Agency costs are a cost of production, and firms that do a better job of minimizing these costs should exhibit better performance. This paper tests this hypothesis by calculating the performance elasticity of average employee hourly compensation for U.S. manufacturing firms. This elasticity...

The dynamic transformation of the Polish economy from a centrally planned to market economy is by now well advanced. The transformation has also contributed to a rapid development of the capital market. However, the leveraged buyout market has hardly been developed yet. The leveraged buyout...

Labor contracts that result in dismissals are quite common in the real world. The question that arises is why employers do not just offer reduced wages instead of asking workers with low realized productivity to leave. This paper argues that such behavior can be explained by workers'...

We analyze the relation of firm performance and managerial turnover in 19th century German banking by probit estimation. This period covers a major reform of corporate governance. Before the reform performance and turnover are unrelated, wheras after the reform more succesfull managers leave...

This paper shows that with a strong labour union, bargaining over piece rate generates higher social welfare than bargaining over fixed wage. Moreover, this social welfare exceeds the social welfare under efficient bargaining level, if the union is very strong.

Evidence contrasting insider trades in the U.S. between high- and low- jeopardy periods and across firms at high and low risk for 10b-5 litigation indicates insiders condition their trades on foreknowledge of price-relevant public disclosures, but avoid profitable trades when jeopardy due to...

The rent-sharing literature and the agency literature both predict a link between pay and performance. The rent-sharing literature relies on short-term market power to explain this link, and the agency literature bases its prediction on the importance of incentives in principal-agent...

The existing debate about policies designed to foster the development of a stakeholder economy have largely avoided a fundamental question. How large is the financial stake employees currently hold in their companies? This paper addresses this question using data from the Datastream database,...

This paper evaluates the intensity of the value-maximization incentives for average employees generated through wage, salary, and bonus mechanisms. This is accomplished through estimation of the elasticity of average employee hourly compensation with respect to changes in firm performance. This...

According to empirical evidence, extrinsic incentives often crowd out intrinsic motivation, thus reducing the effort choices of workers. This article presents a simple model illustrating how the introduction of monetary incentives causes a discontinuous reduction in worker effort as well as a...