This paper explores the evolution of average wage paid to employees along the life-cycle of a manufacturing plant in U.S. Average wage starts out low for a new plant and increases along with labor productivity, as the plant survives and ages. As a plant experiences productivity decline and...

Numerous studies have documented a positive association between information technology (IT) investments and business- and establishment-level productivity, but these studies usually pay sole or disproportionate attention to small- or medium-sized entities. In this paper, we revisit the evidence...

Young and small firms are typically matched with younger and nonemployed individuals, and they provide these workers with lower earnings compared to other firms. To explore the mechanisms behind these facts, a dynamic model of entrepreneurship is introduced, where individuals can choose not to...

What type of businesses do unions target for organizing and when? A dynamic model of the union organizing process is constructed to answer this question. A union monitors establishments in an industry to learn about their productivity, and decides which ones to organize and when. An...

This paper examines the relationship between employer-sponsored offers of health insurance and establishments’ labor productivity. Our empirical work is based on unique plant level data that links the 1997 and 2002 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Insurance Component with the 1992, 1997, and...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the impact of mergers and acquisitions (Mamp;As)on wages and employment and plant closures in the meat packing, prepared meat products, and poultry slaughter and processing industries over 1977-87 and 1982-92. The analysis relies on a balanced panel...

Consideration of the “best interests” of Workers Compensation (WC) claimants often involves the assumption that those who receive benefits in a “lump-sum” behave “too myopically” with respect to labor supply. However, many attorneys argue that lump-sum settlements induce a beneficial...

Studies of moral hazard in wage insurance programs such as Unemployment Insurance (UI) or Workers Compensation (WC) have demonstrated that higher benefits discourage work, emphasizing the price distortion inherent in benefit provision. Utilizing administrative data linking WC claim records to...

In recent years, the rate at which workers and businesses exchange jobs has declined in the United States. Between 1998 and 2010, rates of job creation, job destruction, hiring, and separation declined dramatically, and the rate of job-to-job flows fell by about half. Little is known about the...

Do the job-to-job moves of workers contribute to the cyclicality of employment growth at different types of firms? In this paper, we use linked employer-employee data to provide direct evidence on the role of job-to- job flows in job reallocation in the U.S. economy. To guide our analysis, we...