TY  - JOUR
AU  - Gibbons,Robert
TI  - Incentives and Careers in Organizations
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 5705
PY  - 1997
Y2  - October 1997
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5705
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w5705.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Robert S. Gibbons
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-524
Cambridge, MA  02142
Tel: 617/253-0283
Fax: 617/253-2660
E-Mail: rgibbons@mit.edu
AB  - 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.
ER  -