EOPP Conference: Microfoundations of Development Workshop, May 29 - 30, 2009

Maitreesh Ghatak is organizing the "Microfoundations of Development Workshop" on May 29 - 30, 2009 at LSE. The venue of the conference is:

R505, 5th Floor
Lionel Robbins Building, LSE
10 Portugal Street, WC2A 2AE.

The programme committee consists of Maitreesh Ghatak, Tim Besley, Greg Fischer and Gerard Padro i Miguel.

Coordinator: Miriam Sinn (email: M.J.Sinn@lse.ac.uk, Tel: +44 (0)20 7852 3536).

For more details, click here.

EOPP Conference: Microfoundations of Development Workshop: May 29 - 30, 2009

Maitreesh Ghatak is organizing the "Microfoundations of Development Workshop" on May 29 - 30, 2009 at LSE. The venue of the conference is:

R505, 5th Floor
Lionel Robbins Building, LSE
10 Portugal Street, WC2A 2AE.

The programme committee consists of Maitreesh Ghatak, Tim Besley, Greg Fischer and Gerard Padro i Miguel.

Coordinator: Miriam Sinn (email: M.J.Sinn@lse.ac.uk, Tel: +44 (0)20 7852 3536).

For more details, click here.

Journal Editorship: Maitreesh Ghatak

Starting January 2009, Maitreesh Ghatak has taken up the associate editorship of the Journal of Comparative Economics.

Best Paper Award: Nathan Foley-Fisher

Nathan Foley-Fisher was awarded the "Best Paper in International Finance" award at the RIEF IX Doctoral Meeting in Aix-en-Provence, France for his paper on "The HIPC Initiative and Terms of Trade Shocks".

For more details click here.

Recent Publications: ''Social Incentives in the Workplace'' by Oriana Bandiera

A paper by Oriana Bandiera entitled "Social Incentives in the Workplace" (joint with Iwan Barankay and Imran Rasul) is forthcoming in Review of Economic Studies.

In this paper, the authors present evidence on social incentives in the workplace, namely on whether workers’ behavior is affected by the presence of those they are socially tied to, even in settings where there are no externalities among workers due to either the production technology or the compensation scheme in place. To do so the authors combine data on individual worker productivity from a firm’s personnel records with information on each worker’s social network of friends in the firm. They find that compared to when she has no social ties with her co-workers, a given worker’s productivity is significantly higher when she works alongside friends who are more able than her, and significantly lower when she works with friends who are less able than her. As workers are paid piece rates based on individual productivity, social incentives can be quantified in monetary terms and are such that — (i) workers who are more able than their friends are willing to exert less effort and forgo 10% of their earnings; (ii) workers who have at least one friend who is more able than themselves are willing to increase their effort and hence productivity by 10%. The distribution of worker ability is such that the net effect of social incentives on the firm’s aggregate performance is positive. The results suggest that firms can exploit social incentives as an alternative to monetary incentives to motivate workers.

For more details, click here.