This paper documents variation in working conditions among workers in the United States, presents new estimates of how workers value these conditions, and assesses the impact of working conditions on estimates of the wage structure and inequality. We use evidence from a series of...

Concerns that technological progress degrades job opportunities have been expressed over much of the last two centuries by both professional economists and the general public. These concerns can be seen in narratives both in scholarly publications and in the news media. Part of the expressed...

Neoclassical labor market theories imply that employers will react to binding minimum wages by changing the level of employment. A multitude of studies consider this aspect of minimum wages, yet fail to reach a consensus as to its employment effects. While the employment effects of the minimum...

Measurement of the full costs and benefits of energy-saving technologies is often difficult, confounding adoption decisions. We study consequences of the adoption of energy-efficient LED lighting in garment factories around Bangalore, India. We combine daily production line-level data with...

This paper assesses the evidence regarding the effects of multinational production on wages and working conditions in developing countries. It is motivated by recent controversies concerning whether multinational firms in developing countries exploit workers by paying low wages and subjecting...

This paper presents another extension of the approach initiated by Brown. As in Brown's work, the wage change specification is used to control for bias due to omitted ability data. Then, as in Duncan and Hoimlund's study, working conditions are measured using subjective self?reported data....

I examine the impact of the overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards on weekly hours worked between 1938 and 1950 by comparing workers in wholesale trade, a sector which was covered by the Act, with those in retail trade, a sector which was not. I find that the Act reduced hours worked,...

The 2004 Global Labor Survey (GLS) is an Internet-based survey that seeks to measure de facto labor practices in countries around the world, covering issues such as freedom of association, the regulation of work contracts, employee benefits and the prevalence of collective bargaining. To find...

We study the effect of globalization on the volatility of wages and worker welfare in a model in which risk is allocated through long-run employment relationships (the 'invisible handshake'). Globalization can take two forms: International integration of commodity markets (i.e., free trade) and...

The "Hawthorne effect," a concept familiar to all students of social science, has had a profound influence both on the direction and design of research over the past 75 years. The Hawthorne effect is named after a landmark set of studies conducted at the Hawthorne plant in the 1920s. The first...