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In this chapter, we examine the impact of pay-for-performance incentives on learning-by-doing. We exploit personnel data on fruit pickers paid under two distinct compensation contracts: a standard piece rate plan and one with an extra one-time bonus tied to output. Under the latter, we observe bunching of performance just above the bonus threshold, suggesting workers distort their behavior in response to the discrete bonus. Such bunching behavior increases as workers gain experience. At the same time, the bonus contract induces considerable learning-by-doing for workers throughout the productivity distribution who presumably hope to one day hit the target, and these improvements significantly outweigh the losses to the firm from the bunching. In contrast, under the standard piece rate contract, we find minimal evidence of bunching and only small performance improvements at the bottom of the productivity distribution. Our results suggest that contract design can help foster learning on the job, underscoring the importance of dynamic considerations in principle-agent models.

This chapter provides an empirical assessment of the effects of infrastructure provision on structural change and aggregate productivity using industrylevel data for a set of developed and developing countries over 1995–2010. A distinctive feature of the empirical strategy followed is that it allows the measurement of the resource reallocation directly attributable to infrastructure provision. To achieve this, a two-level top-down decomposition of aggregate productivity that combines and extends several strands of the literature is proposed. The empirical application reveals significant production losses attributable to misallocation of inputs across firms, especially among African countries. Also, the results show that infrastructure provision has stimulated aggregate total factor productivity growth through both within and between industry productivity gains.

This study aims to undertake the evaluation and examination of the productivity change of the Egyptian banking sector. Using a novel data set covering 14 banks operating in the Egyptian market from 1997 to 2013. We use a nonparametric approach (based on data envelopment analysis (DEA)) to investigate the productivity change in the Egyptian banking sector. Input-oriented Malmquist indices of productivity change are estimated with DEA to measure total factor productivity (TFP) change. The TFP changes are decomposed into the product of technological change and technical efficiency change (catch-up). In the second stage, we study potential determinants of productivity change using a regression model. We find that the Egyptian banking sector as a whole shows a productivity regress of 0.9% per year, mainly due to the technological improvements. The estimated regression model identifies some variables that significantly influence the productivity of banks in Egypt. The banks with higher loan to deposit ratio and higher returns on equity have higher productivity growth reflecting on their strong strategic and managerial skills. The size of a bank seems to be associated with an increase in productivity. The maturity of a bank (measured by age) is associated with higher productivity. The NIM and NIETA variables do not seem to be affecting the productivity of banks. Surprisingly, our results reveal that the financial crisis was negatively and statistically insignificant, hence it had no effect on the Egyptian banks.

To assess: (1) the prevalence of specific work practices that incorporate use of information and communication technology (ICT), (2) whether these practices are connected to employee distress or productivity via work extension or social network processes; (3) the implications of ICT-based work practices for the work/family interface.

We draw on the 2008 Pew Networked Workers data collected from a nationally representative sample of workers and use logistic regression methods to investigate links among use of specific ICT-based practices and increases in distress or productivity.

(1) Use of e-mail, instant messaging, texts, and social networking sites at work varies by demographic, organization, and job characteristics, and (2) ICT-based work extension, social network expansion, and connectivity to work colleagues are linked to increases in distress and productivity. Connecting with family or friends while at work can reduce the likelihood that an employee reports an increase in work stress.

Limitations include a cross-sectional design, age of the data, missing data, and measurement issues. Even with these limitations, there are few investigations drawing from national samples of employees that can assess work-related ICT use with this level of depth.

Findings point to technological innovation as an important factor influencing work extension and social network processes and connect this to changes in employee distress and productivity. The focus on productivity is especially important given the emphasis that previous research has placed on linking ICT use and employee distress.

This chapter provides a survey of alternative methodologies for measuring and comparing productivity and efficiency of airlines, and reviews representative empirical studies. The survey shows the apparent shift from index procedures and traditional OLS estimation of production and cost functions to stochastic frontier methods and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methods over the past three decades. Most of the airline productivity and efficiency studies over the last decade adopt some variant of DEA methods. Researchers in the 1980s and 1990s were mostly interested in the effects of deregulation and liberalization on airline productivity and efficiency as well as the effects of ownership and governance structure. Since the 2000s, however, studies tend to focus on how business models and management strategies affect the performance of airlines. Environmental efficiency now becomes an important area of airline productivity and efficiency studies, focusing on CO₂ emission as a negative or undesirable output. Despite the fact that quality of service is an important aspect of airline business, limited attempts have been made to incorporate quality of service in productivity and efficiency analysis.

The issue of environmental regulation and productivity has received increasing attention among academics, but little research has focused on Chinese firms despite the serious state of pollution in China. This study aimed to fill that gap. Analyzing a sample of firms from 12 Chinese cities, we found that environmental regulation could improve firm productivity, but the responses to environmental regulation differed across industry sectors, firm sizes, and locations. In this paper, we discuss the implications of these responses toward the environmental policy in China.

This chapter reports on a longitudinal quasi-experimental field study within an organizational design of a global consumer products manufacturer moving toward high-performance work systems (HPWSs) in North America by integrating business centers and self-directed work teams (SDWTs) coupled with 13 other action-levers within an integrated and bundled high-performance organizations (HPOs) re-design. The results of this organizational design effort are assessed using different types and levels of organizational outcomes (hard record data, behavioral, and attitudinal measures) along a 5-year temporal dimension punctuated by multiple time periods (baseline, during, and after). The organization, which was “built to change” (Lawler & Worley, 2006), in this research had already highly superior or “exemplar” (Collins, 2001) levels of organizational performance. Consequently, the real research question becomes: “What effect does state of the art organizational design and development have on an exemplar organization?” The study also calls into question the field's ability to truly assess exemplar organizations with existing measures of organizational change and development.

We demonstrate in a laboratory experiment that the effectiveness of performance-contingent incentives is inversely related to risk-aversion levels. For about 16.5% of participants, performance fails to improve under performance-pay, and the probability of such failure increases with risk-aversion. This phenomenon works in part through the reduced effort level of more risk-averse individuals when effort level is positively correlated with risk exposure. It is also associated with higher self-reported levels of stress by more risk-averse people working under performance-contingent pay. We find no evidence of such stress causing decrements in the quality of effort affecting performance after controlling for effort level. However, controlling for effort, more risk-averse participants perform better under a fixed salary, leaving less room for improvement under performance-pay.