Group-based incentive pay is attractive in contexts where production is complex and interdependent, yet freeriding is a paramount concern. We assess the introduction of group-based performance pay in a modern industrial production setting using difference-in-difference estimation. Performance...

The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1978 expanded employee age protections to age 70, making the widespread practice by U.S. firms of mandating retirement at age 65 illegal. Building on the work of Lazear (1979), we propose that the law change not only weakened the long-term employment...

In a nationally-representative sample, we predict retirement savings using survey-based elicitations of exponential-growth bias (EGB) and present bias (PB). We find that EGB, the tendency to neglect compounding, and PB, the tendency to value the present over the future, are highly significant...

We conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how a web-based retirement saving calculator affects workers' retirement-savings decisions. In both conditions, the calculator projects workers' retirement income goal. In the treatment condition, it also projects retirement income based on...

Defaults have been shown to have a powerful effect on retirement saving behavior yet there is limited research on who is most affected by defaults and whether this varies based on features of the choice environment. Using administrative data on employer-sponsored retirement accounts linked to...

By combining Danish registry data covering the population of Danish workers with the Danish Labor Force Survey (DLFS) which provides detailed data on working hours, we provide fresh evidence and insights on a potentially important role that career concerns/considerations play in accounting for...

We study employee absence in Danish organizations. In contrast to Steers and Rhodes (1978), who stress the importance of individual and organizational characteristics in shaping employees' motivation to attend work, we show that absence is predominantly an individualized phenomenon. Because the...

Promotions and cross-firm mobility provide substantial gains in earnings ﾖ a well established finding based on gross income data. Yet, what matters for incentives is how much an individual can consume or save after taxation. We show that net and gross income growth patterns may differ...

Denmark's registry data provide accurate and complete career history data along with detailed personal characteristics (e.g., education, gender, work experience, tenure and others) for the population of Danish workers longitudinally. By using such data from 1992 to 2002, we provide rigorous...

In recent decades most developed countries have experienced an increase in income inequality. In this paper, we use an equilibrium search framework to shed additional light on what is causing an income distribution to change. The major benefit of the model is that it can accommodate shocks to...