Salary data from a single firm are analyzed in an effort to identify the firm's wage policy. We find that employees are partly shielded against changes in external market conditions; that wage variation within a job level is large both cross-sectionally and for individuals over time, often leading to substantial real wage declines; that wage increases are serially correlated even controlling for observable characteristics; and that promotions and wage growth are strongly related, even though promotion premiums are small relative to the large wage differences between job levels. None of the major theories of wage determination can alone explain the evidence.

We analyze twenty years of personnel data from one firm. The hierarchical structure is quite simple and stable. Career movements suggest that the employee's rate of learning and the firm's learning about ability are important. There are promotion “fast tracks.” Exit rates vary little with tenure or salary. The firm has personnel policies like those described in the internal labor markets literature, although several theoretical preconditions for ILMs, such as ports of entry and exit, are lacking. Job levels are important to compensation, but there is also substantial individual variation in pay within levels. Our companion paper (in this issue) explores the wage policy of this firm.

Incentive contracts often include important subjective components that mitigate incentive distortions caused by imperfect objective measures. This paper explores the combined use of subjective and objective performance measures in (respectively) implicit and explicit incentive contracts. We show that the presence of sufficiently effective explicit contracts can render all implicit contracts infeasible, even those that would otherwise yield the first-best. We also show, however, that in some circumstances objective and subjective measures are complements: neither an explicit nor an implicit contract alone yields positive profit, but an appropriate combination of the two does. Finally, we consider subjective weights on objective measures.