Incentives in Merchant Empires: Portuguese and Dutch Labor Compensation

Claudia Rei ()

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: The different organizational structure of the Portuguese and Dutch merchant empires affected their ability to monitor workers. I test the theoretical implications of these differences using micro data of overseas workers' compensation from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. The two merchant empires used significantly different compensation structures: working for the king of Portugal corresponded to a higher bonus share of compensation on average than that of the Dutch East India Company. These results are consistent with theoretical implications and provide additional support to the historical evidence we have on the organizational structure of merchant empires.

Keywords: Merchant Empires; Labor Compensation; Incentives; Monitoring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J33 N34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cis, nep-his, nep-hrm and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/28712/1/MPRA_paper_28712.pdf original version (application/pdf)

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:pra:mprapa:28712

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().