Incentives in Merchant Empires: Portuguese and Dutch Compensation Schemes

Claudia Rei ()

No 1112, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers from Vanderbilt University Department of Economics

Abstract: The Portuguese and Dutch merchant empires had a similar geographic distribution with outposts all around the Indian Ocean, which they controlled and manned. Both empires faced the same problem of monitoring their agents in remote corners of the world. Each, however, arrived at a different solution to the monitoring problem. I use a principal-agent model to link different monitoring options to the different organizational structures of the two empires. I further investigate the implications of the model with archival data on labor compensation for Portuguese and Dutch workers overseas.

Keywords: merchant empires; labor compensation; monitoring (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J33 N33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.accessecon.com/pubs/VUECON/vu11-w12.pdf First version, September 2011 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Incentives in merchant empires: Portuguese and Dutch compensation schemes (2013)
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:van:wpaper:1112

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers from Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by John P. Conley ().