Wages or Fringes? Some Evidence on Trade-offs and Sorting The two key predictions of hedonic wage theory are that there is a trade-off between wages and nonmonetary rewards and that the latter can be used as a sorting device by firms to attract and retain the kind of employees they desire. Empirical analysis of these topics are scarce as they require detailed data on all monetary as well as non...

We analyze experimentally the role of vertical and horizontal fairness in labor relations with implicit contracts. We focus on two prominent wage schemes in firms with more than one agent: wage equality as an extreme form of wage compression and individual wage setting. We find that efforts and efficiency are significantly higher under individual wages. This is not caused by differences in mone...

This paper presents a contracting model of governance based on the premise that CEOs are the main promoters of governance change. CEOs use their power to extract higher pay or private benefits, and different governance structures are preferred by different CEOs as they favor one or the other type of compensation. The model explains why good countrywide investor protection breeds good firm gover...

I investigate the relation between firm risk and firm transparency over the period 1992-2006 and find that the level of firm transparency and the level of firm risk are negatively related. I also find that higher CEO pay-performance sensitivity (delta) works to mitigate this inverse relationship. This result is consistent with Hermalin and Weisbach (2007) who suggest that managers reduce risk t...

Piecework versus Timework in British Wartime Engineering The British engineering industry experienced extreme production and employment pressures during the rearmament period that preceded the Second World War and in the early war years. Did it react by placing a greater emphasis on incentive-compatible payment methods? This paper examines the relative employment and wage effects on pieceworker...

New approaches in health care, such as e.g. Integrated Delivery Systems, affect the role and tasks of medical suppliers. More and more, medical suppliers are incorporated into the process of guiding patients to medical specialists and hospitals and thus managing the course of disease. In this context, the role of medical gatekeepers and case managers may provide opportunities for undesirable be...

Does International Outsourcing Really Lower Workers’ Income? We analyze the impact of international outsourcing on income, if the domestic labor market is imperfect. We distinguish in our analysis between the case where the parties negotiate over the wage only and where they negotiate over both wage and profit share. We find that in the first case outsourcing will reduce (increase) workers’ inc...

In this paper I focus on the effect of informal networks on individuals’ job search and earnings. In the empirical analysis, conducted on data drawn from the 1991 and 1993 Bank of Italy Survey of Household Income and Wealth, I show that while seeking work through informal networks (referrals by friends, relatives, or acquaintances to potential employers) increases the probability of receiving j...

In a seminal paper, B. R. Holmstro m and P. R. Milgrom (1987, Econometrica 55, 303 328) examine a principal-agent model in which the agent continuously controls the drift rate of a Brownian motion. Given a stationary environment, they show that the optimal sharing rule is a linear function of aggregated output. This paper considers a variant of the Brownian model in which control revisions take...

This paper analyzes the relations among firm-level stock option portfolio incentives, investment, and firm value based on a sample of Finnish firms during the time period 1987 – 2000. Utilizing exact and complete information regarding stock option portfolio characteristics, we find some evidence that firm investment is increasing in the incentives to increase stock price (delta) and risk (vega)...