Performance pay increases productivity but also earnings inequality. Can it widen the gender gap because women are less responsive? We provide answers by aggregating evidence from existing experiments on performance pay that have both male and female subjects, regardless of whether they test for gender differences. We develop a Bayesian hierarchical model (BHM) that allows us to estimate both the average effect and the heterogeneity across studies. We find that the gender response difference is close to zero and heterogeneity across studies is small. We also find that the average effect of performance pay is positive, increasing output by 0.28 standard deviations. The data are thus strongly supportive of agency theory for men and women alike.

It is well-documented that performance pay has positive effort and selection effects in routine, easy to measure tasks, but its effect in knowledge creation is much less understood. I study the effect of performance pay on research productivity through effort and selection effects using the introduction of performance pay in German academia as a natural experiment. To this end, I consolidated information from various, unstructured data sources to construct a data set that encompasses affiliation histories and publication records of the universe of German academics. The specifics of the roll-out of the performance-related pay scheme give rise to differential incidence of performance and selection incentives across tenure and age cohorts, which allows me to causally and separately identify the effort and selection effects using difference-in-differences estimation. I find that performance pay increases total research output and impact by a cautiously estimated 14 to 18%. Average quality and impact, however, decreases by 9 to 10%. These effort effects are persistent and display substantial heterogeneity, with less productive academics driving the total output increase while top quartile academics drive the decrease in average quality. Performing textual analysis on paper abstracts to construct novelty and impact metrics, I find that the work of top quartile academics also becomes less novel. Finally, more productive academics are more likely to select into performance pay. Hence, while the most productive academics self-select into higher-powered incentives and total research output increases in response to performance pay, the extra knowledge created is not the most impactful or novel.

In this paper I study the effect of performance-related pay on the distribution of academics across universities and provide empirical evidence that performance pay increases the clustering of similarly productive academics, giving rise to a less homogeneous distribution of academic stars across universities. If positive spillovers exist in academia, so that academics become more productive when their colleagues are more productive, a pay scheme that rewards academic productivity (performance pay) should then drive academics to seek out more productive colleagues, leading to clusters of superstars. I make this precise in a matching model, where I frame the academic job market as a hedonic coalition formation model and show that performance pay should have a greater effect on matching assortativeness when complementarities are stronger. I then study the effect of performance pay on the distribution of academics empirically using the introduction of performance pay in German academia as a natural experiment. To this end I constructed a new data set that encompasses the affiliations and productivity of the universe of academics in the country to analyze changes in faculty composition over time. I test whether the introduction of performance-related pay increases clustering of similarly productive academics (positive matching assortativeness) in a difference-in-differences framework, where I use the strength of complementarities in academic fields as a measure of treatment intensity. Using the average number of co-authors in a field as a proxy for complementarity strength, I find that performance pay increases positive matching assortativeness two- to three-fold: a department whose faculty publishes on average almost one more AER every three years is able to attract junior hires who on average publish almost one more AER every five years post-reform compared to every ten years pre-reform. This result is robust to controlling for alternative explanations; most notably pre-existing trends and differential hiring budget.

Existing empirical research suggests worker output and workload are positively correlated, but exactly how the two are related is not yet well understood. We study how workload affects performance outcomes and how workers adjust their labor input and organize their tasks in response to workload. We address these questions using a dynamic multi-tasking model with labor-leisure and quality-quantity choices in which the production environment allows for efficiencies of scale. We find that in heterogeneous contexts, where there is more learning within projects than within the same step across projects, it is optimal to work sequentially, completing one project before starting the next. In contrast, in homogeneous contexts, in which learning within the same step across projects is relatively stronger, it is optimal to juggle tasks by working in batches, completing the same step across projects. Output increases with workload in either context. While timeliness may decrease in heterogeneous contexts, quality and timeliness are expected to increase in homogeneous contexts because higher workload increases the efficiency of batch work. We provide empirical evidence of the theoretical predictions using detailed workload, productivity, time and internet use data of insurance claims examiners across two departments that handle heterogeneous and homogeneous claims respectively, and who face plausibly exogenous variation in workload. We show evidence consistent with examiners working sequentially in the heterogeneous context and working in batches in the homogeneous context. A one standard deviation increase in workload increases output by 2.8% in the heterogeneous context and 9.3% in the homogeneous context, while tardiness decreases and quality increases in the latter context only.

Organisations must increasingly transform themselves to take advantage of technological change. Today, ICT allows public bodies to make new use of procurement mechanisms that achieve economies of scale and greater flexibility. Meanwhile, international comparisons of scientific output measures can help to shed light on the variation in productivity of different national research funding systems. Finally, examining bibliometric data to calculate collaboration between authors affiliated with different countries, this chapter compares and draws conclusions on research intensity and collaboration strength for different countries and regions, research fields and over time. The authors conclude with detailed observations on the actual evolution of S&T collaboration, both within the GCC and with other parts of the world.