EEAG’s 2007 Report provides a comprehensive forecast for the European economy for the coming year, with a special section on Eastern European countries. In addition, it addresses several important policy issues, including an in-depth examination of whether the features of the Scandinavian...

High-performance work systems give workers more discretion, thereby increasing effort productivity but also shirking opportunities. We show experimentally that screening for work attitude and labor market competition are causal determinants of the viability of high-performance work systems, and...

In Bartling, Fehr, and Schmidt (2012) we show theoretically and experimentally that it is optimal to grant discretion to workers if (i) discretion increases productivity, (ii) workers can be screened by past performance, (iii) some workers reciprocate high wages with high effort, and (iv)...

Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951, Econometrica, 19, 293-302), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to...

In 2005 the world economy still developed strongly, but, with GDP growth of 41/2 percent, at a somewhat slower pace than in 2004. Developments still differed substantially among major regions. Whereas output continued to increase in a robust and strong manner in the US and it showed a clear...

We report on several experiments on the optimal allocation of ownership rights. The experiments confirm the property rights approach by showing that the ownership structure affects relationship-specific investments and that subjects attain the most efficient ownership allocation despite starting...