The concept of pay for performance for public school teachers is growing in popularity and use, and it has resurged to once again occupy a central role in education policy. Performance Incentives: Their Growing Impact on American K-12 Education offers the most up-to-date and complete analysis of this promising—yet still controversial—policy innovation. Performance Incentives brings together an interdisciplinary team of experts, providing an unprecedented discussion and analysis of the pay-for-performance debate by • Identifying the potential strengths and weaknesses of tying pay to student outcomes; • Comparing different strategies for measuring teacher accomplishments; • Addressing key conceptual and implemen - tation issues; • Describing what teachers themselves think of merit pay; • Examining recent examples in Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, and Texas; • Studying the overall impact on student achievement.

Individuals and firms can improve their performance through collaboration and competition. However, it is still an open question how collaboration and competition schemes can be optimally designed and incentivized in order to exploit their full potential. Jonas Heite investigates this question by assessing efforts to stimulate R&D collaboration and by examining properties as well as underlying mechanisms (e.g., effort, risk, confidence and stress) of ability configurations in contests. Based on three large-scale economic studies covering laboratory, field and natural experiments, the author applies novel and sophisticated econometric methods to provide causal empirical evidence that yields important implications for policymakers, managers and researchers.

Rapidly changing technology, the globalization of markets, and the declining role of unions are just some of the factors that have led to dramatic changes in working conditions in the United States. Little attention has been paid to the difficult measurement problems underlying analysis of the labor market. Labor Statistics Measurement Issues helps to fill this gap by exploring key theoretical and practical issues in the measurement of employment, wages, and workplace practices. Some of the chapters in this volume explore the conceptual issues of what is needed, what is known, or what can be learned from existing data, and what needs have not been met by available data sources. Others make innovative uses of existing data to analyze these topics. Also included are papers examining how answers to important questions are affected by alternative measures used and how these can be reconciled. This important and useful book will find a large audience among labor economists and consumers of labor statistics.

Recent advances in incentive theory stress the multi- dimensional nature of agent effort and specifically cases where workers affect one another's performance through "helping" efforts. This paper models helping efforts as determined by the compensation package and task allocation. The model is tested with Australian evidence on reported helping efforts within workgroups. The evidence consistently supports the hypothesis that helping efforts are reduced, while individual efforts are increased, when promotion incentives are strong. Piece rates and profit-sharing appear to have little effect on helping efforts. Contrary to the predictions of some recent theoretical models, task variety and helping efforts are positively correlated.

This text provides an introduction to personnel economics, showing how economists can make specific predictions and prescriptions for personnel issues that arise in business on a daily basis. The author focuses on compensation and its relation to worker motivation, selection and teamwork.