IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxecpp/v75y2023i2p325-345..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Stress, effort, and incentives at work

Author

Listed:
  • Elena Cottini
  • Paolo Ghinetti
  • Elisabetta Iossa
  • Pierluigi Sacco

Abstract

An extensive medical and occupational-health literature finds that an imbalance between effort and reward is an important stressor which produces serious health consequences. We incorporate these effects in a simple agency model with moral hazard and limited liability and study the impact on agents’ effort and utility, as well as incentive pay provision, assuming agents differ in stress susceptibility. We test main model’s implications using the 2015 wave of the European Working Condition Survey. We find that individuals who are more susceptible to stress work harder and have lower subjective well-being. The likelihood of receiving incentive pay is not monotone in stress susceptibility.

Suggested Citation

  • Elena Cottini & Paolo Ghinetti & Elisabetta Iossa & Pierluigi Sacco, 2023. "Stress, effort, and incentives at work," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 75(2), pages 325-345.
  • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:75:y:2023:i:2:p:325-345.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpac021
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
    • I31 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Welfare, Well-Being, and Poverty - - - General Welfare, Well-Being
    • J33 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Compensation Packages; Payment Methods
    • L2 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:75:y:2023:i:2:p:325-345.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oep .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.