This paper presents evidence that, across many European countries, the 1990s have witnessed an intensification of labour effort, and investigates explanations for this process. Using data drawn from The European Survey on Working Conditions, we construct an index of work effort and show that it...

There is now a burgeoning literature on the topic of 'overeducation' (and the complementary concept of 'undereducation'), and a growing quantity of UK empirical evidence on this issue. However, as Joop Hartog indicated in his keynote address to the Applied Econometrics Association, 'a solid...

We use establishment-level data from the 1991 Employers Manpower and Skills Practices Survey (EMSPS) and individual-level data from the Autumn 1993 Quarterly Labour Force Survey (QLFS) to investigate the links between training provision and workplace unionization. We focus on two training...

We investigate the impact of computer usage at work and other job features on the changing skills required of workers. We compare skills utilisation in Britain at three data points: 1986, 1992 and 1997, using responses to identical questions on comparable surveys. We question the validity of...

This paper tracks the rise in the percentage of employees who have never become union members (¿nevermembers¿) since the early 1980s and shows that it is the reduced likelihood of ever becoming a member rather than the haemorrhaging of existing members which is behind the decline in overall...

This paper examines the ongoing changes in strategy, structure, and performance of the largest 250 non-financial firms in both Britain and Germany. To this end, publicly available firm-level data is presented at first and supplemented by the results of a questionnaire survey that was sent to the...

Firms' decisions about which goods to produce are often made at a more disaggregate level than the data observed by empirical researchers. When products differ according to production technique or the way in which they enter demand, this data aggregation problem introduces a bias into standard...

We compare the economic consequences and political feasibility of reforms aimed at reducing barriers to entry (deregulation) and improving contractual enforcement (legal reform). Deregulation fosters entry, thereby increasing the number of firms (entrepreneurship) and the average quality of...

What enables some employee ownership firms to overcome the free rider problem andmotivate employees to improve performance? This study analyzes the role of humanresource policies in the performance of employee ownership companies, using employeesurvey data from 14 companies and a national sample...

This paper considers the effect of status or relative income on work effort, combining experimental evidence from a gift-exchange game with the analysis of multi-country ISSP survey data. We find a consistent negative effect of others' incomes on individual effort in both datasets. The...