This paper analyses the productivity effects of five different types of employee benefits. The IAB establishment panel for the year 2000 is used as the data set. The results of the study largely confirm the incentive theories which assume that fringe benefits have a positive impact on a firm's...

Flexibility and heterogeneity are important topics in labour market research. Since 2004 the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) has funded a research network addressing the issue of 'Flexibility in Heterogeneous Labour Markets', which intends to uncover possibilities for fostering...

The market has both a coordination function and an incentive function. The first theorem of welfare economics is all about coordination; the principal-agent model is all about incentives. What is the relative importance of the market in carrying out these two functions? While there has been a...

Motivation in Organisations: Searching for a Meaningful Work-Life Balance extends the current motivation models in business education to include motives of human behaviour that have been neglected for decades. It debunks some of the myths about human motivation (self-interest as the dominant...

This paper explores the role of social groups in explaining the reaction to control.We propose a simple model with a principal using control devices and a controlledagent, which incorporates the existence of social groups. Testing experimentally theconjectures derived from the model and related...

Many studies have established that people care a great deal about their relative economic position and not solely, as standard economic theory assumes, about their absolute economic position. However, behavioral evidence is rare. This paper provides an empirical analysis on how individuals'...