This paper studies technology adoption in a cluster of soccer-ball producers in Sialkot, Pakistan. We invented a new cutting technology that reduces waste of the primary raw material and gave the technology to a random subset of producers. Despite the arguably unambiguous net benefits of the...

This paper studies how asymmetric information over inputs affects workers' response to incentives and self-selection at the workplace. Using daily records from a Peruvian egg production plant, we exploit a sudden change in the worker salary structure and find that workers' effort, firm profits,...

During the recent COVID-19 pandemic, traditional (offline) chess tournaments were prohibited and instead held online. We exploit this as a unique setting to assess the impact of moving offline tasks online on the cognitive performance of individuals. We use the Artificial Intelligence embodied...

This paper studies learning within organizations when incentives change. We use a simple principal-agent model to show how, in the presence of imperfect information over the shape of the production function, worker's effort choice changes over time as information is disclosed and processed. We...

We use information from the new OECD Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) to investigate the link between job tasks and cognitive skill demand in 22 advanced economies. Skill demand is operationalized by the assessed literacy and numeracy skills of workers with well-matched skills to their job duties....

We explore whether the introduction of trust based working hours is related to the subsequent innovation performance of firms. Employing a panel data set of over 5,000 German establishments, we implement a propensity score matching approach where we only consider firms that did not use trust...

This paper studies the link between working hours and productivity using daily information on working hours and performance of a sample of call centre agents. We exploit variation in the number of hours worked by the same employee across days and weeks due to central scheduling, enabling us to...

We ran a field experiment to investigate whether individual performance in teams depends on the gender of the leader. About 430 students from an Italian University took an intermediate exam that was partly evaluated on the basis of teamwork. Students were randomly matched in teams of three and...

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...

The impact of wage increases on job satisfaction is explored theoretically and empirically. To do this, we apply a utility function that rises with the absolute wage level as well as with wage increases. It is shown that when employees can influence their wages by exerting effort, myopic utility...