During the great depression of the 1930s, facing drastic unemployment and declining incomes, many of the European countries affected engaged in protecting their national markets through import protection. This beggar-thy-neighbor policy gave the economists’ profession an impetus to show what...

This chapter analyzes the antecedents and consequences of transformations that have recently been occurring among Israeli kibbutzim. After serving for nearly a century as some of the world's best known examples of organizations that distribute resources “from each, according to ability, to...

We envision an enterprise owned by an association of its employees. The enterprise may employ nonmember as well as member labor. All are paid the same wage, but member-employees also accrue credit toward a pension as a benefit of their employment. Nonmember employees do not receive this benefit....

In their now classic book What Do Unions Do ? Freeman and Medoff (1984) open their discussion as follows (p. 3): “Trade unions are the principal institution of workers in modern capitalistic societies. For over 200 years, since the days of Adam Smith, economists and other social scientists,...

Many firms in many countries started to issue stock option schemes to their employees in the 1990s ( Murphy, 1999 ). In the course of time, the mushrooming of schemes has generated a heated public debate on the pros and cons of this compensation method. In one camp are those who argue that stock...

Compensation systems have been shifting away rapidly from a fixed-wage contractual payment basis in many nations around the world ( Ben-Ner & Jones, 1995 ). Particularly prominent is the explosion in the use and interest in employee financial participation schemes, such as profit sharing,...

This study provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between job design and the labor-market environment in which firms operate. In particular, I focus on one aspect of job design: the extent to which employees have discretion (autonomy) to organize their work. There has been...