The relationships among merit pay raises, trait positive affectivity (PA), and reactions to merit pay increases (pay attitudes and behavioral intentions) were explored in a longitudinal study of hospital employees. Drawing on signal sensitivity theory, the authors expected that PA would moderate the relationship between merit pay raise size and reactions to the increase such that pay raise size...

Tells the story of a social studies teacher (Kevin Spacey) who gives an assignment to his junior high school class to think of an idea to change the world for the better, then put it into action. When one young student (Haley Joel Osment) creates a plan for 'paying it forward' favors (pyramid style!), he not only affects the life of his struggling single mother (Helen Hunt), but he sets in moti...

Existing evidence suggests that returns to entrepreneurship are low relative to the returns to wage work. These findings have been associated with non-pecuniary benefits, and more generally with heterogeneity in preferences, rationality or beliefs. In this paper I challenge this view. I extend the data and show that the differential in earnings is in fact U-shaped, with entrepreneurs earning mo...

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In Portugal, increases in investment expenditures and changes in the composition of spending favouring highly visible items are associated with higher vote percentages for incumbent mayors seeking re-election. The political payoff to opportunistic spending increased after democracy became well-established in the country. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

All HARA-utility investors with the same exponent invest in a single risky fund and the risk-free asset. In a continuous time-model stock proportions are proportional to the inverse local relative risk aversion of the investor (1/γ-rule). This paper analyses the conditions under which the optimal buy and hold-portfolio of a HARA-investor can be approximated by the optimal portfolio of an invest...

Lump-sum severance pay from which shirkers can be excluded raises employment in an efficiency wage economy. However, severance payments are usually related to wages. It is shown that earnings-related, mandated severance pay will have ambiguous employment effects if effort can be varied continuously. A substitution of the earnings-related for the lump-sum component reduces employment. Thus, the ...

There exists large and persistent variation in not only how, but when employees are paid, a fact unexplained by existing theory. This paper develops a simple model of optimal pay timing for firms. When workers have self-control problems, they under-save and experience volatile consumption between paychecks. Thus, pay whose delivery matches the timing of workers’consumption needs will reduce wag...

1188 Our sensory system is constantly bombarded with inputs, but owing to the brain's fi nite processing power, we are forced to pay attention to only a tiny proportion of these inputs at any given time. In a new study, Richard Davidson and colleagues report that intensive training in meditation can alter the way in which the brain allocates attentional resources to important stimuli, allowing ...