Marisa Ratto

*Smarter Task Assignment or Greater Effort: The Impact of Incentives on Team Performance

We use an experiment to study the impact of team-based incentives, exploiting rich data from personnel records and management information systems. Using a triple difference design, we show that the incentive scheme had an impact on team performance, even with quite large teams. We examine whether this effect was due to increased effort from workers or strategic task reallocation. We find that the provision of financial incentives did raise individual performance but that managers also disproportionately reallocated efficient workers to the incentivised tasks. We show that this reallocation was the more important contributor to the overall outcome.

The indirect effects of auditing taxpayers.

Empirical studies suggest that the effects of tax audits are not only in terms of recovered unpaid tax (direct effect) but there are also indirect effects in terms of future better compliance that tend to outweigh the direct effect. However, current policy decisions on the allocation of investigation resources across different groups of taxpayers generally neglect the indirect effects, generating a potential resource misallocation issue. With the aim to clarify a possible mechanism through which the indirect effects work, the authors model tax compliance as a social norm and show that taxpayers’ interdependencies introduce a multiplier effect to an increase in the audit rate.