This paper reviews the evidence on the effectiveness of individual merit pay systems for teachers on student achievement, and it presents new empirical results based on a system established within a collective bargaining environment. While many merit pay systems have been established in school...

In an industrialized economy, it is nearly impossible to engage in market work while simultaneously caring for young children. Thus, if a mother is to engage in such work, someone else must care for her children during work hours. However, non-maternal child care is often expensive or of poor...

In Europe in recent times, bargaining between a leading nationally-based industrial union and a representative group of employers over the issues of employment, wages and working time has proved to be influential in a much wider industrial context. Adopting a generalized Nash bargaining...

This paper examines three questions: 1) How and why have financial models of doing business emerged in the last three decades? 2) What new forms of financial capitalism have become important in the current period? 3) How do new financial intermediaries, such as private equity, and the financial...

Nearly half of U.S. employers test job applicants and workers for drugs. I use variation in the timing and nature of drug testing regulation to study discrimination against blacks related to perceived drug use. Black employment in the testing sector is suppressed in the absence of testing,...

Pre- and post-intervention data on health outcomes, absenteeism, and productivity from a longitudinal, quasi-experimental design field study of office workers was used to evaluate the economic consequences of two ergonomic interventions. Researchers assigned individuals in the study to three...

Employer-provided health benefit coverage for workers who retire before age 65 has fallen over the last decade. We examine a cohort of male workers from the Health and Retirement Survey to examine questions about the dynamics of retiree health benefits and the relationship between retiree health...

Are early retiree health benefits (RHBs) a form of deferred compensation that binds workers to an employer? Most employers who offer RHBs offer them only to workers who have 10 or more years of tenure with the firm and have reached age 55. Accordingly, workers in firms offering RHBs have an...

A majority of married couples in the United States take advantage of the fact that employers often provide health insurance coverage to spouses. When the older spouses become eligible for Medicare, however, many of them can no longer provide their younger spouses with coverage. In this paper, we...