Using data from the universe of Danish manufacturing firms and workers over the period 1995-2007, we estimate output gains linked to productivity spillovers through worker mobility, and calculate the shares in these gains accrued to firms, to the workers who bring spillovers, and to the rest of...

The application of the classical "linear" model of incentive pay to the case when the noise is multiplicative to effort generates two predictions for a given strength of incentives: 1) more risk-averse workers will put in less effort, and 2) setting a performance target will weaken the negative...

We show that control function estimators (CFEs) of the firm production function, such as Olley-Pakes, may be biased when productivity evolves with a firm-specific drift, in which case the correctly specified control function will contain a firm-specific term, omitted in the standard CFEs. We...

In a field experiment with a retail chain (1,300 employees, 193 shops), randomly selected sales teams received a bonus. The bonus increases both sales and number of customers dealt with by 3%. Each dollar spent on the bonus generates $3.80 in sales, and $2.10 in profit. Wages increase by 2.2%...

In a field experiment, a large retail chain's CEO asked managers of treated stores “to do what they can” to reduce personnel turnover. Turnover decreases by a quarter for nine months; a reminder treatment triggers a similar decrease for a shorter period. Treated managers report shifting...

Anonymous and unannounced site inspections known as "Mystery Shopping" (MS) are common in multi-site service firms, but little is known about the strategic importance of this practice. We conceptualize MS as a monitoring tool firms use to implement the optimal allocation of site resources...

We study the effect of recognition on performance with a field experiment involving first-year undergraduate students at a Dutch university. Our treatment, given unannounced in randomly selected student groups, was to publicly recognize students who scored within the top 30% of their group on...

There is a lively debate on the persistence of the current banking crisis' impact on GDP. Impulse Response Functions (IRF) estimated by Cerra and Saxena (2008) suggest that the effects of earlier crises were long-lasting. We show that standard estimates of IRFs are highly sensitive to...