Advocates of apprenticeship programmes often argue as if it is simply a matter of historical accident that such investment by US firms has been hindered. This paper explores the structure of incentives underpinning the German system of apprenticeship training. First, we describe three...

Based on a unique composite dataset measuring heterogeneous sports participation, labour market outcomes and local facilities provision, this paper examines for the first time the association between different types of sports participation on employment and earnings in England. Clear...

In contrast to the United States or the United Kingdom where union status is generally tied to the job, the typical unionized worker in Germany is a member of an industry union and there is no direct institutional link between union membership and the worker's wage. Using micro data from the...

Before the transition governments had strong distributional objectives, which they pursued mainly by direct controls over state enterprise wage rates and hiring decisions, yielding a highly compressed wage distribution. During the reform they maintained similar controls over state enterprises,...

This paper studies the effect of changes in foreign competition on the incentives faced by U.S. managers in the form of wage structures, promotion profiles, and job turnover. We use a panel of executives and measure foreign competition as import penetration. Using tariffs and exchange rates as...

This Paper shows that increasing product market competition can have a direct impact on the employment relationship and on wage inequality. I develop a simple model in which an increase in product market competition increases returns to skill through the effect of competition on the sensitivity...

We examine the relationship between the employment and compensation of managers and CEOs and the presence of a unionized workforce. We develop a simple efficiency wage model, with a tradeoff between higher wages for workers and more monitoring, which requires more managers. The model also...

This paper investigates the effects of firm entry deregulation. We exploit a recent reform that simplified business entry in Portugal as a quasi-natural experiment. We use cross-municipality-year variation in the implementation of the reform for identification. Using matched employer-employee...

Poor families around the world spend a large fraction of their income on consumption of goods that appear to be useless in alleviating poverty, while saving at very low rates and neglecting investment in health and education. Such consumption patterns seem to be related to the persistence of...

Two of the earliest inventions of a human capital-intensive technology were for the production of personal internal goods that enabled humans to derive more pleasure out of leisure, namely dance and music. I model the incentives to invent hobbies and to acquire hobby skills, and its implications...