Piece Work Pay and Hourly Pay over the Cycle This paper investigates the relative cyclical behavior of the pay of piece workers and hourly paid workers. It uses a unique data set of blue-collar workers in British engineering between 1926 and 1966. The statistics are obtained from the payrolls of firms belonging to the Engineering Employers Federation (EEF). Roughly, the EEF accounted for one-th...

Using the National Compensation Survey between 2004-2014, we document substantial cyclical heterogeneity among performance pay and fixed wage jobs. We find that employment growth in performance pay (fixed wage) jobs is countercyclical (procyclical), whereas compensation per employee growth is procyclical (countercyclical). Our estimates are identified off the response of similar work levels wit...

Economists usually assume that monetary incentives improve performance, and psychologists claim that the opposite may happen. We present and discuss a set of experiments designed to test these contrasting claims. We found that the effect of monetary compensation on performance was not monotonic. In the treatments in which money was offered, a larger amount yielded a higher performance. However,...

This study examines the pressures which lead to employers offering low-paid, insecure jobs and also considers the scope for change. Employers determine terms and conditions and how work is organised, including pay, the balance between temporary and permanent work, skill requirements and progression structures. In seeking to reduce intermittent poverty, it is, therefore, important to consider ho...