Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidise the price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a new survey of employees in a multinational with a share ownership plan, we find considerable variation in joining among...

A detailed longitudinal dataset is assembled containing annual performance and biographical data for every player over the entire history of professional major league baseball. The data are then aggregated to the team level for the period 1920-2009 in order to test whether teams built on a more...

This paper examines how employees’ experiences of, and attitudes towards, work have changed over the last quarter of a century. It assesses the extent to which any developments relate to the economic cycle and to trends in the composition of the British workforce. Many of the findings are...

We establish the effects of salaries on worker performance by exploiting a natural experiment in which some workers in a particular occupation (football referees) switch from short-term contracts to salaried contracts. Worker performance improves among those who move onto salaried contracts...

Job satisfaction and job anxiety are negatively correlated. Still, using linked employer-employee data for Britain, we find that higher wages are associated with higher job satisfaction and higher job anxiety. While the association between higher wages and job anxiety is robust to the inclusion...

More complete systems of human resource management (HRM) could deliver really extensive gains in employee motivation, according to an analysis of representative data from British workplaces by Michael White and Alex Bryson. Their research explores whether the introduction of 'high-performance...

This paper examines if workplace and co-worker union status affect employee wellbeing. In contrast to the literature focusing on links between one’s own membership status and wellbeing, we focus principally on non-union employees. We find that being in a union workplace and having union...

Recent work in psychology and economics has investigated ways in which individuals experience their lives. This literature includes influences on individuals' momentary happiness. We contribute to this literature using a new data source, Mappiness (www.mappiness.org.uk), which permits...

Recent work in psychology and economics has investigated ways in which individuals experience their lives. This literature includes influences on individuals’ momentary happiness. We contribute to this literature using a new data source, Mappiness (www.mappiness.org.uk), which permits...

This paper assesses union effects on workplace closure in the private sector in Britain between 1990 and 1998 using panel data from the 1990-98 Workplace Employee Relations Survey. On average, unions raised the chances of workplace closure in Britain in the 1990s, in contrast to the 1980s....