This paper presents a model of executive compensation in which the executive is risk averse and has specific knowledge - knowledge about the optimal actions to take that is costly to transfer to the principal. The model generates predictions that are consistent with the available evidence and...

Employment protection harms early-career employees without benefitting them in later career stages (Leonardi and Pica, 2013). We demonstrate that this pattern can result from employers exploiting naive present-biased employees. Employers offer a dynamic contract with low early-career wages, an...

Employer-provided health benefits for workers who retire before age 65 has fallen over the last decade. We examine a cohort of male workers from the Health and Retirement Survey to explore the dynamics of retiree health benefits and the relationship between retiree health benefits and retirement...

Basierend auf einem neuen, die deutschen Prime-Standard-Unternehmen für die Jahre 2005 bis 2007 umfassenden Datensatz untersuchen wir die Determinanten der Höhe der Vorstandsvergütung. Dabei unterscheiden wir drei Kategorien möglicher Einflussfaktoren: Unternehmens-, Performance- und...

Are monetary and non-monetary incentives used as substitutes in motivating effort? I address this question in a laboratory experiment in which the choice of the job characteristics (i.e., the mission) is part of the compensation package that principals can use to influence the agents' effort....

Using the NBER Shared Capitalism Database comprised of over 40,000 employee surveys from 14 firms, we investigate worker attitudes towards employee ownership, profit sharing, and variable pay. Specifically, our study uses detailed survey questions on preferences over profit sharing, forms of...

Performance pay has been shown to have important implications for worker and firm productivity. Although workers' skills may directly matter for the cost of effort to reach performance goals, surprisingly little is know about the heterogeneity in the effects of incentive pay across workers. In...

During the last decade, a surprisingly high percentage of U.S. companies has fulfilled or beatenanalysts´ earnings per share forecasts. One of the most frequently cited reasons for this growingtendency is a change in the nature of U.S. executive compensation structure. As stock options...

While in the US stock-based incentives are commonly used since the 50s of the last century, in Germany they were invented only some ten years ago. Even in 1996 firms faced considerable regulatory difficulties when willing to grant such incentives. In the meantime the legal environment has...

Despite the social importance of awards, they have been largely disregarded by academic research in economics. This paper investigates whether a specific, yet important, award in economics, the John Bates Clark Medal, raises recipients' subsequent research activity and status compared to a...