We study the relationship between employee satisfaction and abnormal stock returns around the world, using lists of the “Best Companies to Work For” in 14 countries. We show that employee satisfaction is associated with positive abnormal returns in countries with high labor market...

Unlike many other contracts, employment contracts are subject to various external administrative procedures governing separations, ranging from compulsory severance payments and advance notice periods (usually seniority based), to collective layoff procedures (usually depending on the firm's...

In this paper we develop a theory of union bargaining power based on firm-specific skills acquired by the insider work-force. We show that unions increase the bargaining power of insiders only in states of the world in which the firm would like to retain insiders but not hire outsiders. Union...

Political struggles between the emerging European liberal states and the Catholic church in the 18th and 19th centuries provoked the formation of highly oppositional labour movements, resulting in Catholic countries having conflictual labour relations until the present. Based on the premise that...

Using firm-, industry-, and country-level data, we document a link between family ownership and labour relations. Across countries, we find that family ownership is relatively more prevalent in countries in which labour relations are difficult, consistent with firm-level evidence suggesting that...

This paper uses the British Household Panel Survey to investigate when seniority is rewarded by automatic incremental scales. Scales are seen as an alternative to individual merit pay. They are likely to be used when individual productivity is hard to measure, when firms provide all workers with...

The paper surveys unemployment policies for advanced market economies and evaluates them by examining the predictions of the underlying macroeconomic theories. The basic idea is that, for the most part, different unemployment policy prescriptions rest on different macroeconomic theories, and our...

This Paper studies the inter-temporal problem of a monopolistic firm that engages in productivity-enhancing innovations to reduce its labour costs. If the level of wages is sufficiently low, the firm's rate of productivity growth approaches the rate of wage growth and eventually the firm reaches...

In this paper we develop a fully game-theoretic version of the right-to-manage model of firm-level bargaining where strategic interactions among firms are explicitly recognized. Our main aim is to investigate how equilibrium wages and employment react to changes in the labour and product...

The paper analyses how a firm-level tax (or subsidy) calculated on the average wage relative to a pre-set norm may promote employment. We assume a monopoly union setting wages at the firm level to maximize that part of the wage bill exceeding the reservation wage. The fiscal device affects union...