Incentives and Careers in Organizations / Robert Gibbons.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gibbons, Robert.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w5705.

NBER working paper series no. w5705

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 1996.

Summary:

This paper surveys two related pieces of the labor-economics literature: incentive pay and careers in organizations. In the discussion of incentives, I first summarize theory and evidence related to the classic agency model, which emphasizes the tradeoff between insurance and incentives. I then offer econometric and case-study evidence suggesting that this classic model ignores several crucial issues and sketch new models that begin to analyze these issues. In the discussion of careers in organizations, I begin by summarizing evidence on wages and positions using panel data within firms. This evidence is sparse and far-flung (drawn from industrial relations, organizational behavior, and sociology, as well as from labor economics); I identify ten basic questions that merit more systematic investigation. Turning to theory, I describe building-block models that address one or a few pieces of evidence, but focus on more recent models that address broad patterns of evidence.

Notes:

Print version record

August 1996.