Results

CEP discussion paper

Meaning at work

We evaluate a firm's unusual, worker-centered, solution to the agency problem: enabling employees to reduce the cost of effort rather than pushing them with performance rewards. We randomize the roll-out of the firm's "D...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review: Insights:

Induced Innovation, Inventors, and the Energy Transition

We study how individual inventors respond to incentives to work on “clean” electricity technologies. Using natural gas price variation, we estimate output and entry elasticities of inventors and measure the medium-term i...Read more...

Journal article

Industrial and Corporate Change:

More or the same? Radical, disruptive, discontinuous, and breakthrough innovation

This paper addresses the conceptual ambiguity in the literature on exceptional innovations, labeled “radical,” “disruptive,” “breakthrough,” or “discontinuous.” A bibliometric analysis of 4407 articles shows that differe...Read more...

Journal article

The Review of Economic Studies:

A Theory of Falling Growth and Rising Rents

Growth has fallen in the U.S. amid a rise in firm concentration. Market share has shifted to low labour share firms, while within-firm labour shares have actually risen. We propose a theory linking these trends in which ...Read more...

Journal article

American Economic Review :

The Impact of Regulation on Innovation

We present a framework that can be used to assess the equilibrium impact of regulation on endogenous innovation with heterogeneous firms. We implement this model using French firm-level panel data, where there is a sharp...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Peer pressure and manager pressure in organisations

We study the interaction between horizontal (peer) and vertical (manager) social factors in workers' motivation. In our setting, individuals work using open-plan desks. Using a natural experiment, we identify a sharp inc...Read more...

CEP Insights

Crime

What can economics tell us about crime? Economists have discovered that young people who leave school during a recession are more likely to end up in prison than those who enter the labour market when the economy is buoy...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Public Economics:

Learning from praise: Evidence from a field experiment with teachers

Financial incentive programs for teachers are increasingly common, but little is known about the effectiveness of non-monetary incentives in improving educational outcomes. This field experiment measures how repeated pub...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of the European Economic Association:

CEO pay and the rise of relative performance contracts: A question of governance?

We exploit the large rise in relative performance awards in the United Kingdom over the last two decades to investigate whether these contracts improve the alignment between CEO pay and firm performance. We first documen...Read more...

Journal article

Review of Economics and Statistics:

The tyranny of the single-minded: Guns, environment, and abortion

We study how electoral incentives affect policy choices on secondary issues, which only minorities of voters care intensely about. We develop a model in which office and policy-motivated politicians vote in favor of or a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Measuring and explaining management in schools: new approaches using public data

Why do some students learn more in some schools than others? One consideration receiving growing attention is school management. To study this, researchers need to be able to measure school management accurately and chea...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Guns, environment and abortion: how single-minded voters shape politicians decisions

We study how electoral incentives affect policy choices on secondary issues, which only minorities of voters care intensely about. We develop a model in which office and policy motivated politicians choose to support or ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

CEO pay and the rise of relative performance contracts: a question of governance?

Would moving to relative performance contracts improve the alignment between CEO pay and performance? To address this, we exploit the large rise in relative performance awards and the share of equity pay in the UK over ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Multitask agents and incentives: the case of teaching and research for university professors

This paper evaluates the behavioural responses of multitask agents to the provision of incentives skewed towards one task only. In particular it studies the case of strong research incentives for university professors an...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Can helping the sick hurt the able? Incentives, information and disruption in a welfare reform

The UK Jobcentre Plus reform sharpened bureaucratic incentives to help disability benefit recipients (relative to unemployment insurance recipients) into jobs. In the long-run, the policy raised disability exits by 10% a...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

When pressure sinks performance: evidence from diving competitions

Tournaments are designed to enhance participants’ effort and productivity. However, ranking near the top may increase psychological pressure and reduce performance. We empirically study the impact of interim rank on perf...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Employee stock purchase plans - gift or incentive? Evidence from a multinational corporation

Many large listed firms offer workers the opportunity to buy shares in the firm at discounted rates through employee stock purchase plans (ESPP). The discounted rate creates a gift exchange, where the firm hopes that wor...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Because I'm worth it: a lab-field experiment on the spillover effects of incentives in health

We conduct a controlled lab-field experiment to directly test the short-run spillover effects of one-off financial incentives in health. We consider how incentives affect effort in a physical activity task ? and then how...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Neighbors, Knowledge, and Nuggets: Two Natural Field Experiments on the Role of Incentives on Energy Conservation

There is increasing research on the exogenous impact of descriptive social norms on economic behavior. The research to date has a number of limitations: 1) it has not de-coupled the impact of the norm and the knowledge r...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Decision-making and implementation in teams

We use a mechanism–design approach to study a team whose members choose a joint project and exert individual efforts to execute it. Members have private information about the qualities of alternative projects. Informatio...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Great Stagnation: What Can Policymakers Do?

Although the economic recovery in the UK has been disappointing, it is inappropriate to either assert that Japan’s two lost decades illustrate the ineffectiveness of stimulative monetary policy or that the UK is predesti...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Not all Incentives Wash out the Warm Glow: The Case of Blood Donation Revisited

The issue of the nature of the altruism inherent in blood donation and the perverse effects of financial rewards for blood and/or organ donation has been recently revisited in the economic literature with limited consens...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Matching Firms, Managers, and Incentives

We exploit a unique combination of administrative sources and survey data to study the match between firms and managers. The data includes manager characteristics, such as risk aversion and talent; firm characteristics, ...Read more...

SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

The Economics Implications of House Price Capitalization: A Synthesis

In this article I argue that the extent to which fiscal variables are capitalized into house prices has important economic implications. I synthesize an emerging literature that explores the conditions under which public...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

A Simple Theory of Managerial Talent, Pay Contracts and Wage Distribution

This paper develops a simple theory of pay structures and pay levels across heterogeneous agents by bringing together optimal contracts inside the firm and competitive resource allocation in the market. The central idea ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Managerial Incentives and Compensation in a Global Market

This paper embeds a principal-agent firm in an otherwise standard trade model a la Melitz (2003) to investigate the impact of globalization on the provision of managerial incentives and on the distribution of managerial ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Do Salaries Improve Worker Performance?

We establish the effects of salaries on worker performance by exploiting a natural experiment in which some workers in a particular occupation (football referees) switch from short-term contracts to salaried contracts. W...Read more...

CEE/Education and skills discussion paper

Individual Teacher Incentives, Student Achievement and Grade Inflation

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SERC/Urban and Spatial Programme Discussion Paper

Does Hospital Competition Save Lives? Evidence from the English NHS Patient Choice Reforms

This paper examines whether or not hospital competition in a market with fixed reimbursement prices can prompt improvements in clinical quality. In January 2006, the British Government introduced a major extension of the...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Motivation and Sorting in Open Source Software Innovation

This paper studies the role of intrinsic motivation, reputation, and reciprocity in driving open source software innovation. Unlike previous literature based on survey data, we exploit the observed pattern of contributio...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Incentives in Competitive Search Equilibrium

This paper analyses the interaction between internal agency problems within firms and external search frictions when workers have private information. We show that the allocation of resources is determined by a modified ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

The Impact of Private Ownership, Incentives and Local Development Objectives on University Technology Transfer Performance

We study the impact of private ownership, incentive pay and local development objectives on university licensing performance. We develop and test a simple contracting model of technology licensing offices, using new surv...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Incentives and Invention in Universities

Using data on U.S. universities, we show that universities that give higher royalty shares to faculty scientists generate greater license income, controlling for university size, academic quality, research funding and ot...Read more...

Journal article

Journal of Human Resources:

Crime and economic incentives

We explore the role that economic incentives, particularly changes in wages at the bottom end of the wage distribution, play in determining crime rates. We use data on the police force areas of England and Wales between ...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Is Seniority-Based Pay Used as a Motivation Device? Evidence from Plant Level Data

In this paper we use data from industrial plants to investigate if seniority-based pay is used as a motivational device for production workers. Alternatively, seniority-based pay could simply be a wage setting rule not n...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Matchmaking: the Influence of Monitoring Environments on the Effectiveness of Performance Pay Systems

This study uses cross-section and panel data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey to explore contextual influences on the relationship between performance-related pay (PRP) and organizational performance. Wh...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Does Performance Pay De-Motivate, and Does It Matter?

The sheer scale and speed of the shift of payment system from time-based salaries to performance-related pay, PRP, in the British public services provides a unique opportunity to test the effects of incentive pay schemes...Read more...

CEP discussion paper

Why Does Performance Pay De-Motivate: Financial Incentives versus Perfrormance Appraisal

The sheer scale and speed of the shift of payment system from time-based salaries to performance-related pay, PRP, in the British public services provides a unique opportunity to test the effects of incentive pay schemes...Read more...