NBER Publications by Martin Conyon

We investigate gift exchange relationships in real jobs, making use of a field quasi-experiment associated with the exercise of stock options for roughly 4500 managers in a large public company. In this company, option grants are set equally for all employees within occupational categories, and financial markets set the price at which the options are ultimately exercised. We assert that the considerable variation that we observe across employees and over time in profits from those sales is beyond the control of the individual employee and can be thought of as effectively randomized. We also assert that employees perceive the profit they receive from exercising these options at least in part as the equivalent of a gift: Higher profits in turn cause them to reciprocate with better job perfo...

This paper examines the use and consequences of shared compensation plans (profit sharing, profit related pay, SAYE schemes and company stock option plans) in a sample of UK workplaces and firms in the 1990s. The use of these plans has increased over time, in part in response to government programs. The evidence shows that companies and workplaces adopting shared compensation practices have had higher productivity than other firms, but the effects vary among programs, suggesting that the particulars matter a lot in aligning shared compensation and work place activities. Consistent with incentive theory, the evidence also shows that firms and workplaces with shared compensation practices have a higher incidence of shared decision-making / information sharing practices.