HR return on investment (ROI) is still important, as is the need to create business cases for HR programs. But, as companies move toward profitable growth, the focus is no longer on strategic cost reduction and HR transformation, but on talent acquisition, management and retention.

Survey reports of the incidence of chronic conditions are considered by many researchers to be more objective, and thus preferable, measures of unobserved health status than self-assessed measures of global well being. In this paper we evaluate this hypothesis by attempting to validate these...

Public health agencies around the world have renewed efforts to increase the incidence and duration of breastfeeding. Maternity leave mandates present an economic policy that could help achieve these goals. We study their efficacy focusing on a significant increase in maternity leave mandates in...

The correlation of occupational gender composition and wages is the basis of pay equity/comparable worth legislation. A number of previous studies have examined this correlation in US data, identifying some of the determinants of low wages in female jobs, as well as important limitations of...

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive picture, circa the late 1980's, of occupational gender segregation in Canada and its consequences for wages. Our analysis reveals sensitivity of the estimated penalty to female work to both specification and estimation strategy. Our preferred estimates...

We investigate the effect of pro-active comparable worth legislation covering both the public and private sectors on wages, the gender wage gap and the gender composition of employment. The focus is the pay equity initiative of the Canadian province of Ontario in the early 1990s. We document...

In this paper, we investigate the mechanism by which the femaleness of occupations has a negative effect on women's wages. We relate US/Canada differences in labor market institutions, the returns to skills and other dimensions of the wage structure, such as occupational rents, to corresponding...

Using U.S. panel data on adult males, the author compares the 'profile heterogeneity model' of earnings dynamics, in which the earnings-experience profile varies across individuals, to a competing model in which earnings 'has a unit root.' The latter specification enjoys increasing popularity...

Maternity leaves can affect mothers' and infants' welfare if they first affect the amount of time working women stay at home post birth. We provide new evidence of the labor supply effects of these leaves from an analysis of the introduction and expansion of job-protected maternity leave in...