Temporary contracts and employee effort

Employee handbooks and employment-at-will contracts.

Dynamic labor contracts with temporary layoffs and permanent separations

We study the implications of optimal dynamic contracts in private information environments for fluctuations in effort and employment across time and productivity states. To this end, we incorporate temporary layoffs and permanent separations as well as on-the-job effort variations into a dynamic model of moral hazard. We consider two different “commitment” environments. In a “full commitment” e...

Pay Spread and Skewness , Employee Effort and Firm Productivity by

We test predictions from theories of tournament, fairness and tastes for skewness about the effects of pay spread and skewness on employee effort and firm productivity. The data come from the population of 6,501 medium-to-large sized Danish private sector firms matched with all their employees during 1992-95. Potential simultaneity problems are addressed by instrumental variables provided by in...

Self-Managed Working Time and Employee Effort: Microeconometric Evidence

Based on German individual-level panel data, this paper empirically examines the impact of self-managed working time (SMWT) on employee effort. Theoretically, workers may respond positively or negatively to having control over their own working hours, depending on whether SMWT increases work morale, induces reciprocal work intensification, or encourages employee shirking. We find that SMWT empl...

Performance Standards and Employee Effort: Evidence from Teacher Absences

The 2001 No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) increased accountability pressure in U.S. public schools by threatening to impose sanctions on Title 1 schools that failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) in consecutive years. Difference-in-difference estimates of the effect of failing AYP in the first year of NCLB on teacher effort in the subsequent year suggest that, on average, teacher absence...