We conduct a field experiment in a naturally occurring labor environment and track whether the performance of workers responds to unexpected wage increases. Specifically, we investigate how the timing of wage increases affects efforts. We find that workers' performance is about 11% higher for...

We study the impact of managers on the success of professional soccer teams using data from the German "Bundesliga". We evaluate the performance impact of individual managers by estimating regression models that include both team and manager fixed effects, where we are exploiting the high...

When a key responsibility of a manager is to allocate more or less attractive tasks to subordinates, these subordinates have an incentive to work hard and demonstrate their talents. As a new manager is less well acquainted with these talents this incentive mechanism is reinvigorated after a...

It is often claimed that supervisors do not differentiate enough between high and low performing employees when evaluating performance. The purpose of this paper is to study the incentive effects of this behavior empirically. We first show in a simple model that the perceived degree of past...

We investigate the effects of inequality in wealth on the incentives to contribute to a public good when agents are inequity averse and may differ in ability. We show that equality may lead to a reduction of public good provision below levels generated by purely selfish agents. But introducing...

We conduct a field experiment in a naturally occurring labor environment and track whether the performance of workers responds to unexpected wage increases. Specifically, we investigate how the timing of wage increases affects efforts. We find that workers performance is about 11% higher for the...