IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlabec/doi10.1086-717728.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A Pay Change and Its Long-Term Consequences

Author

Listed:
  • Miriam Krueger
  • Guido Friebel

Abstract

In a professional services firm, top management unexpectedly adjusted the pay of consultants in some divisions to the pay in other divisions. In this quasi experiment, fixed wages increased and bonuses decreased, reducing pay for the high performers and increasing it for the low performers. Individual outputs and efforts decreased by 30%, and attrition and absenteeism increased. The effects were driven by those who were rationally expecting to lose from the pay change. Observing a period of more than 3 years, we show long-term negative reciprocity of those affected but no negative selection effects of new hires.

Suggested Citation

  • Miriam Krueger & Guido Friebel, 2022. "A Pay Change and Its Long-Term Consequences," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 40(3), pages 543-572.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucp:jlabec:doi:10.1086/717728
    DOI: 10.1086/717728
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/717728
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/717728
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1086/717728?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

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

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Marco Fongoni & Daniel Schaefer & Carl Singleton, 2023. "Why wages don't fall in jobs with incomplete contracts," Economics Discussion Papers em-dp2023-12, Department of Economics, University of Reading.
    2. Gall, Thomas & Hu, Xiaocheng & Vlassopoulos, Michael, 2023. "Incentivizing Team Leaders: A Firm-Level Experiment on Subjective Performance Evaluation of Leadership Skills," IZA Discussion Papers 16123, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).

    More about this item

    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:ucp:jlabec:doi:10.1086/717728. 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: Journals Division (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JOLE .

    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.