Encouraging Others: Punishment and Performance in the Royal Navy

Hans-Joachim Voth and Guo Xu

No 14476, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Can severe penalties †encourage the others†? Using the famous case of the British Admiral John Byng, executed for his failure to recapture French-held Menorca in 1757, we examine the incentive effects of judicial punishments. Men related to Byng performed markedly better after his unexpected death. We generalize this result using information from 963 court martials. Battle performance of captains related to a courtmartialed and convicted officer improved sharply thereafter. The loss of influential connections was key for incentive effects – officers with other important connections improved little after Byng’s execution or other severe sentences.

Keywords: Principal agent problems; Punishment; Labor incentives (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D91 J20 N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hrm and nep-ore
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14476 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:14476

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP14476

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().