计量经济分析 = Econometric analysis

I NCENTIVES ARE the essence of economics. Despite many wide-ranging claims about their supposed importance, there has been little empirical assessment of incentive provision for workers. The purpose of this paper is to critically overview existing work on the provision of incentives. Since the interests of workers and their employers are not always aligned, a large theoretical literature has emphasized how firms design compensation contracts to induce employees to operate in the firm's interest. This literature has reached into many areas of compensation and has pointed to a multitude of different mechanisms that can be used to induce workers to act in the interests of their employers. These include piece rates, options, discretionary bonuses, promotions, profit sharing, efficiency wages, deferred compensation, and so on. My objective here is to evaluate this literature in the light of a growing empirical literature on compensation. Where possible, I will address the literature from two perspectives. First, an underlying assumption of this literature is that individuals respond to contracts that reward performance. Accordingly, I consider whether agents behave in this way, and whether these responses are always in the firm's interest. Second, I address whether firms write contracts with these responses in mind. In other words, do contracts look like the predictions of the theory? Incentives are provided to workers

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The Provision of Incentives in Firms

In 590 for-profit and nonprofit firms from the National Organizations Survey, we found positive associations between human resource management (HRM) practices, such as training and staffing selectivity, and perceptual firm performance measures. Results also suggest methodological issues for consideration in examinations of the relationship between HRM systems and firm performance.

/pdf/the-impact-of-human-resource-management-practices-on-2c2vl7nm6j.pdf

The Impact of Human Resource Management Practices on Perceptions of Organizational Performance

The authors investigate the productivity effects of innovative employment practices using data from a sample of thirty-six homogeneous steel production lines owned by seventeen companies. The productivity regressions demonstrate that lines using a set of innovative work practices, which include incentive pay, teams, flexible job assignments, employment security, and training, achieve substantially higher levels of productivity than do lines with the more traditional approach, which includes narrow job definitions, strict work rules, and hourly pay with close supervision. Their results are consistent with recent theoretical models which stress the importance of complementarities among work practices.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2951347.pdf

The Effects of Human Resource Management Practices on Productivity: A Study of Steel Finishing Lines

/pdf/the-theory-of-industrial-organization-19bejph0ej.pdf

The Theory of Industrial Organization

Partnerships and profit sharing are often claimed to motivate workers by giving them a share of the pie. But in organizations of any significant size, the free-rider effects would seem to choke off...

Peer Pressure and Partnerships

Most models of trade in speculative markets assume that agents interpret public information identically. We provide empirical evidence on the relation between the volume of trade and stock returns around public announcements, and we argue that the evidence is inconsistent with this assumption. We then develop a model of trade around public announcements that incorporates differential interpretations and is consistent with the observed volume-return relation. Then we test the standard model of belief revision underlying most models of trade using stock brokerage research analysts' earnings forecasts. The hypthesis of identical interpretations seems inconsistent with the forecast revisions in these data.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2138584.pdf

Differential Interpretation of Public Signals and Trade in Speculative Markets

We develop a dynamic model of an order-driven market populated by discretionary liquidity traders. These traders must trade, yet can choose the type of order and are fully strategic in their decision. Traders differ by their impatience: less patient traders demand liquidity, more patient traders provide it. Three equilibrium patterns are obtained - the pattern is determined by three parameters: the degree of impatience of the patient traders, which we model as the cost of execution delay in providing liquidity; their proportion in the population, which determines the degree of competition among the liquidity providers; and the tick size, which is the cost of the minimal price improvement. Despite its simplicity, the model generates a rich set of empirical predictions on the relation between market parameters, time to execution, and spreads. We argue that the economic intuition of this model is so basic, its main results must be robust in much more general models.

/pdf/limit-order-book-as-a-market-for-liquidity-1u1kwffj5n.pdf

Limit Order Book as a Market for Liquidity

The relative merits of dealer versus auction markets have been a subject of significant and sometimes contentious debate. On January 20, 1997, the Securities and Exchange Commission began implementing reforms that would permit the public to compete directly with Nasdaq dealers by submitting binding limit orders. Additionally, superior quotes placed by Nasdaq dealers in private trading venues began to be displayed in the Nasdaq market. We measure the impact of these new rules on various measures of performance, including trading costs and depths. Our results indicate that quoted and effective spreads fell dramatically without adversely affecting market quality.

/pdf/effects-of-market-reform-on-the-trading-costs-and-depths-of-22xuhbj2wk.pdf

Effects of Market Reform on the Trading Costs and Depths of Nasdaq Stocks

The use of stock-based compensation as a solution to agency problems between shareholders and managers has increased dramatically since the early 1990s. We show that in a dynamic rational expectations model with asymmetric information, stock-based compensation not only induces managers to exert costly effort, but also induces them to conceal bad news about future growth options and to choose suboptimal investment policies to support the pretense. This leads to a severe overvaluation and a subsequent crash in the stock price. Our model produces many predictions that are consistent with the empirical evidence and are relevant to understanding the current crisis.

/pdf/stock-based-compensation-and-ceo-dis-incentives-4jf9oeavrn.pdf

Eugene Kandel

Papers

Peer Pressure and Partnerships

Differential Interpretation of Public Signals and Trade in Speculative Markets

Limit Order Book as a Market for Liquidity

Effects of Market Reform on the Trading Costs and Depths of Nasdaq Stocks

Stock-Based Compensation and CEO (Dis)Incentives