This paper combines agency theory and internal-labor-market theories to explain the determinants of bonus payments among a large sample of top and middle managers from Spanish firms. A distinction is made between the decision whether to pay bonus or not and the size of the bonus. The empirical...

"This paper studies the dispersion around the expected compensation of workers before and after controlling for hierarchical positions in cross-section data samples. From data for Spanish managers, we find that this dispersion decreases with education and work experience before entering the...

Analyzing data obtained from interviews at 653 Spanish industrial plants in 1997, the authors investigate factors affecting the choice between two ways of filling supervisory and skilled technician positions: internal promotion of blue-collar workers, and external recruitment. The use of...

An analysis is carried out in a sample of 738 industrial plants of the determining factors in the use of internal promotion of blue-collar workers to middle managers and skilled technicians as against their external recruitment. The use of internal promotion is positively correlated with...

This paper provides empirical evidence that young university spin-offs are more likely to receive venture capital than other technological start-ups. In addition, this fact is explained mainly by the lack of managerial skills among the founders of certain university spin-offs. The data used have...

This paper analyzes incentive design when agents' effort influences an uncertain output governed by a random process with semi-heavy tails. We find that the second-best incentive contract pays an output-increasing but bounded fee with a shape resembling performance-standard contracts that pay a...

The observed high levels of banks’ operating efficiency, profi ts and market values in the years before the financial crisis raise reasonable doubts about the information content of conventional performance measures for the accurate assessment of the efficiency of banking intermediation. In...

This article examines the determinants of the equilibrium number of entrepreneurs and the level of productivity in economies where individuals make occupational choices between being self-employed or working as an employee. The results of the theoretical model explain some observed empirical...

The high levels of operating efficiency, profits, and market values for banks in the years before the financial crisis raise reasonable doubts about the accuracy of the assessments of the efficiency of banking intermediation. We examine the productivity growth in Spanish banks in the pre-crisis...

This paper models learning by experience beyond the experience curve, including the possibility of “learning to learn”: the pace of learning increases over time by building on what has already been learned. We compare the extended deterministic learning model with Jovanovic and Nyarkos' [26]...