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This paper studies how employee effort depends upon the manager’s level of narcissism and the framing of the manager’s incentive scheme. In an online experiment with 356 employee participants, the authors manipulate the description of the manager narcissism (high or low) and the framing of the manager’s compensation scheme (bonus or penalty) and examine the joint effect of these two factors on employee effort to help the manager reach their objectives. Results show that employees exert less (more) effort when manager narcissism is high (low). This effect is mediated by employees’ feelings of envy toward the manager. In line with recent research on the cascading effect of management compensation, the authors also find that a manager’s penalty contract has a negative effect on employee effort when manager narcissism is high. The results have important implications for compensation design in business practice.

Remuneration policies may differ from country to country, and their effect on bank stability could be due to the legal framework. Therefore, this study aims to investigate how the legal system impacts the relationship between CEO compensation and bank stability across countries.

To test the study hypotheses, the authors use panel data of 74 banks operating in ten OECD countries during the period 2009–2016 and apply the generalized moments method regression model to better remediate the endogeneity problem.

The findings confirm that a country’s banking regulations significantly affect its bank stability. Common law countries have less bank stability than civil law countries. This result can be interpreted by the fact that, in common-law countries, banks’ CEO are strongly protected by the law, so they allocate a large part of bank assets to risky loans to improve their variable remuneration.

The research can help policymakers understand bank stability in one country. Any legal reform would require prior knowledge of how risk-taking may arise in executive compensation.

The contribution is to explain the controversial effect of executive compensation on bank stability in the framework of legal theory. The authors argue that regulators should monitor compensation structures and that the country’s legal origin of law shapes the CEO compensation structure and is a determinant of bank stability. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no studies exploring this field. So, this study tries to shed more light on the dark side of CEOs’ behavior when undertaking risky projects to maximize their remuneration.

This paper examines the effect of restrictions on executive pay and high CEOs’ compensation on bank performance following the “2008 UK bank rescue policy”.

Using the difference-in-difference estimation technique we assess the relationship between executive compensation and financial performance of rescued banks relative to non-rescued banks over the period 1999–2019.

Our main finding indicates that the relationship between executive compensation and financial performance declines in rescued banks relative to non-rescued banks. Further, we document that performance continues to deteriorate in rescued banks relative to non-rescued banks. Our results are robust to different estimation techniques.

This study contributes to the literature that examines the efficacy of government bailouts during the 2008 crisis. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this study is among the first to examine the long-term implications of bank rescue and pay restrictions on executive compensation and performance post–rescue.

The authors' work aims to identify the employer-specific drivers of the college (or university) wage gap, which has been identified as one of the major determinants of the dynamics of overall wage and income inequality in the past decades. The authors focus on three employer-level features that can be associated with asymmetries in the employment relation orientation adopted for college and non-college-educated employees: (1) size, (2) the share of standard employment and (3) the pervasiveness of incentive pay schemes.

The authors' establishment-level analysis (data from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS), 2005–2018) focusses on Japan, an economy characterised by many unique economic and institutional features relevant to the aims of the authors' analysis. The authors use an adjusted measure of firm-specific college wage premium, which is not biased by confounding individual and establishment-level factors and reflects unobservable characteristics of employees that determine the payment of a premium. The authors' empirical methods account for the complexity of the relationships they investigate, and the authors test their baseline outcomes with econometric approaches (propensity score methods) able to address crucial identification issues related to endogeneity and reverse causality.

The authors' findings indicate that larger establishment size, a larger share of regular workers and more pervasive implementation of IPSs for college workers tend to increase the college wage gap once all observable workers, job and establishment characteristics are controlled for. This evidence corroborates the authors' hypotheses that a larger establishment size, a higher share of regular workers and a more developed set-up of performance pay schemes for college workers are associated with a better capacity of employers to attract and keep highly educated employees with unobservable characteristics that justify a wage premium above average market levels. The authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

The authors' contribution to the existing knowledge is threefold. First, the authors combine the economics and management/organisation literature to develop new insights that underpin the authors' testable empirical hypotheses. This enables the authors to shed light on employer-level drivers of wage differentials (size, workforce composition, implementation of performance-pay schemes) related to many structural, institutional and strategic dimensions. The second contribution lies in the authors' measure of the “adjusted” college wage gap, which is calculated on the component of individual wages that differs between observationally identical workers in the same establishment. As such, the metric captures unobservable workers' characteristics that can generate a wage premium/penalty. Third, the authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

This study explores the social conditions for sustainability practices, addressing the processes whereby associational gardening practices in a highly segregated context may or may not create connections and capacities across urban social divides.

Based on organizational ethnographic fieldwork, the article explores urban gardens as potential meeting places in a segregated city, Gothenburg, focusing on collectively organized gardening projects in different socioeconomic and socio-spatial settings.

The study identifies the unintentional encounters embedded in the immaterial act of gardening, that is, digging, planting and actual gardening practices regardless of the harvest. Such practices were found to be important for social sustainability practices beyond the continuous reproduction of silos, at least in multicultural settings. Nevertheless, many urban gardeners create a green living room for themselves and their neighbours, and engagement with those outside their silos often becomes more of a symbolic act of global solidarity, especially in more culturally homogeneous areas.

The article fills a gap in the research by focusing on the social conditions for sustainability practices in urban segregated areas. By showing how gardening practices often reproduce cultural similarity, the study highlights the importance of revealing practices and places that facilitate unintentional social “bonus” interactions that nonetheless occur in two of the gardening environments studied. Unintentional encounters are identified as important dimensions of social sustainability practices.

The Covid-19 pandemic appears to have engendered heterogeneous effects on individuals’ labour market prospects. This paper focuses on two possible sources of a heterogeneous exposition to labour market risks associated with the pandemic outbreak: the routine task content of the job and the teleworkability. To evaluate whether these dimensions played a crucial role in amplifying employment and wage gaps among workers, we focus on the case of Italy, the first EU country hit by Covid-19.

Investigating the actual effect of the pandemic on workers employed in jobs with a different degree of teleworkability and routinization, using real microdata, is currently unfeasible. This is because longitudinal datasets collecting annual earnings and the detailed information about occupations needed to capture a job’s routine task content and teleworkability are not presently available. To simulate changes in the wage distribution for the year 2020, we have employed a static microsimulation model. This model is built on data from the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (IT-SILC) survey, which has been enriched with administrative data and aligned with monthly observed labour market dynamics by industries and regions.

We measure the degree of job teleworkability and routinization with the teleworkability index (TWA) built by Sostero et al. (2020) and the routine-task-intensity index (RTI) developed by Cirillo et al. (2021), respectively. We find that RTI and TWA are negatively and positively associated with wages, respectively, and they are correlated with higher (respectively lower) risks of a large labour income drop due to the pandemic. Our evidence suggests that labour market risks related to the pandemic – and the associated new types of earnings inequality that may derive – are shaped by various factors (including TWA and RTI) instead of by a single dimension. However, differences in income drop risks for workers in jobs with varying degrees of teleworkability and routinization largely reduce when income support measures are considered, thus suggesting that the redistributive effect of the emergency measures implemented by the Italian government was rather effective.

No studies have so far investigated the effect of the pandemic on workers employed in jobs with a different degree of routinization and teleworkability in Italy. We thus investigate whether income drop risks in Italy in 2020 – before and after income support measures – differed among workers whose jobs are characterized by a different degree of RTI and TWA.

The purpose of this study is to provide in-depth knowledge on customer-facing technology and customer experience in the grocery retail sector, including how the value-added potential of customer-facing technologies may be enhanced.

The analysis is based on 30 in-depth interviews with “early adopters” of customer-facing digital retail technologies in the Norwegian grocery sector. Theoretically, the study draws on notions of the customer journey and customer experience.

The study contributes to deepening insights concerning how digital retail technology is used and may be geared to further increase value for customers, specifically how retailers may use data on customers and products to personalize digital retail technology offerings and gain a competitive advantage. The findings underline how customer value is context-dependent and show that while grocery retail customers primarily emphasize utilitarian benefits related to customer-facing technologies, hedonic benefits are valuable biproducts. Moreover, the study showcases how personalization is key in addressing customers’ needs and wants, and may serve to increase the overall value of customer-facing technologies for customers and retailers.

The study’s sector-specific focus on technology in use contributes to enhance knowledge on how digital retail technologies can be leveraged to the benefit of customers and retailers, including customers’ sector-specific needs and wants.

This study aims to contribute to the ongoing assessment of executive compensation by investigating the nexus between managerial entrenchment factors, adopting a multifaceted perspective encompassing both economic and non-economic dimensions.

This research employs pooled cross-sectional Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression and Least Squares with Dummy Variables (LSDV) models with fixed effects to examine the determinants of Chief Executive Officer (CEO) compensation.

This research identifies firm size, performance (via ROA and Tobin’s Q), and CEO characteristics (age, tenure, stock ownership, MBA degree) as significant determinants of executive compensation at the 0.05 level. In contrast, the prestige of educational institutions, doctoral degrees, and the MBA’s relevance to short-term performance, along with CEO tenure, do not significantly affect pay. Additionally, the study highlights the significance of industry type (manufacturing vs technology) in shaping compensation, emphasizing the role of firm metrics and CEO credentials in designing executive pay packages.

This research introduces an innovative approach to controlling unobserved heterogeneity and adjusting for the dynamic nature of CEO compensation attributes across diverse CEO characteristics. By integrating both pooled Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Least Squares Dummy Variable (LSDV) models, the study addresses the challenges posed by time-invariant variables and unobservable heterogeneity. Such issues have historically skewed the accuracy of traditional OLS models in identifying the comprehensive array of factors—both economic and non-economic—that influence CEO compensation. This novel methodological framework significantly advances the examination of unobservable variables that may vary not only across the firms selected for analysis but also over time periods, thereby offering a more detailed understanding of the determinants of CEO pay.

Bangladesh recently experienced frequent demonstrations by drivers of ridesharing applications. Since the drivers are not excluded from the technology environment, rather they are a part of the digital ecosystem, these protests may point toward the existence of unequal interactional outcomes for different stakeholders afforded by the digital system within the country’s social and cultural contexts. This research is an attempt to unveil the reasons behind value inequality experienced by drivers of ridesharing applications in Bangladesh and understand how power asymmetries influence adverse digital incorporation that can result in the emergence of resistance.

We obtain the data by conducting interviews with 91 drivers of ridesharing platforms in Dhaka, Bangladesh and analyze our data using thematic analysis. We propose an integrated framework unifying adverse digital incorporation (ADI) with the “powercube” model to illuminate our inquiry.

We find the existence of all three drivers to ADI – ignorance/deceit, direct compulsion and exclusion – exclusion being the most prevalent – that are experienced by the drivers of ridesharing applications in Bangladesh. We also find support for the four causes behind value inequality – design inequality, resource inequality, institutional inequality and relational inequality with the respondents placing the highest emphasis on relational inequality. There are visible, hidden and invisible forms of power involved in how the drivers are incorporated into the ridesharing platforms. The forms of power in the platform environment are exercised primarily in closed spaces and the invited spaces for the drivers are very few. The drivers in response to the closed spaces of power create their own space (claimed space) through the help of social media and other messaging apps. We also find that the power over the drivers is exercised at global, national and local levels.

Our research identifies norms specific to the social and cultural contexts of Bangladesh and can help decision-makers to make more informed choices during the formulation of future digital platform guidelines. Based on the research findings, the paper also makes short-term and long-term policy recommendations.

This research has implications for creating a decent work environment for ridesharing drivers which broadly falls under the Sustainable Development Goal 8 (SDG 8).

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper that integrates the ADI model with the “powercube” framework to reveal that the drivers working on the ridesharing platforms in Bangladesh are adversely incorporated into the digital system where value inequalities are operating within the power dimensions.

This paper aims to analyse the gender wage gap (GWG) in the board of directors at the executive-director level. The authors aim to answer two questions: (1) Is the GWG explained by differences between males and females, by discriminatory causes or by both? and (2) what are the main factors that cause or increase the existence of GWGs? Specifically, the authors pay special attention to compliance with good governance codes as a fundamental variable in explaining the GWG.

The study uses a sample of directors in Spanish companies listed on the continuous market from 2013 to 2021 and uses Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition and unconditional quantile regressions to analyse the GWG.

The findings demonstrate both discriminatory reasons and differences between individuals when explaining the GWG and showing that compliance with remuneration practices issued by good governance codes considerably reduces the GWG for all remuneration components.

The study confirms adequacy of regulator remuneration recommendations but highlights GWG persistence within boards. To counter this, enforcing pay transparency aids female directors’ advancement, reducing bonuses’ impact on wage disparity, necessitating monitored laws for fairer compensation systems and meeting 40% of women directors’ proposals.

Primarily, this study significantly influences public attitudes towards GWG. Specifically, it calls for companies to not only increase female leadership representation but also to ensure equitable remuneration aligned with their male counterparts, conduct regular pay equity assessments, implement pay transparency policies and support work-life balance through flexible hours and parental leave. Furthermore, the work serves as a crucial resource for female directors, empowering them to advocate for their rights in the context of GWG.

This research offers nuanced insights into the GWG in corporate boards, corrects the main limitations of previous studies and calls for regulatory reinforcement and the active involvement of female directors and firms in creating equitable policies.