We present new comparable data on the incidence of performance pay schemes in Europe and the USA. We find that the percentage of employees exposed to incentive pay schemes ranges from around 10-15 percent in some European countries to over 40 percent in Scandinavian countries and the US....

The study of football - the clubs, the players, the managers, the referees - is telling us more and more about the operation of labour markets and incentives. Here, Alex Bryson and colleagues show that two-footedness - the rare ability to use both feet equally well to pass, tackle and shoot -...

In the 2001/02 English football season, referees of Premier League matches were paid a salary for the first time. Alex Bryson and colleagues investigate the impact on their performance.

Using nationally representative workplace data for Britain we show how employers have changed their usage of contingent pay schemes over the last quarter century. We find workplaces are more likely to use collective forms of pay system than they did in the past, and they are more likely to use...

There is a growing gap in the union membership wage premium between public and private-sector workers in the United Kingdom. Using the Labour Force Surveys of 1993-2006, the gap between the membership premium in the public and private sectors closes with the addition of three-digit occupational...

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 investigates trends in collective bargaining and worker representation in the German private sector from 2000 to 2008. It seeks to update and widen earlier analyses pointing to a decline in collective bargaining, while providing more information on the dual system as a whole. Using...

Alex Bryson and colleagues use US baseball data to investigate whether performance suffers if there is too wide a gap between the skills of a team's stars and the rest.