Small and informal firms account for a large share of employment in developing countries.The rapid expansion of microfinance services is based on the belief that these firms haveproductive investment opportunities and can enjoy high returns to capital if given theopportunity...

Market imperfections may cause firms and workers to under-invest in specific training. Thispaper shows that profit sharing may be a suitable instrument to enhance specific traininginvestments, either by enhancing wage flexibility or by increasing the returns to training...

According to the Hutchens (1999) model, early retirement is not explained as a result ofmaximizing expected individual utility but rather as a demand-side phenomenon arising froma firm’s profit-maximizing behaviour...

During the 1930s and 1940s, collective bargaining emerged as the workplace governancenorm in much of the U.S. industrial sector. Following its peak in the 1950s, union density inthe U.S. private sector fell steadily, to only 7.4 percent in 2006. Governance shifted from aformalized union norm to...

Teamwork and cooperation between workers can be of substantial value to a firm, yet thelevel of worker cooperation often varies between individual firms. We show that thesedifferences can be the result of labor market competition if workers have heterogeneouspreferences and preferences are...

In an evaluation of a job-training program, the influence of the program on the individualearnings capacity is important, because it reflects the program effect on human capital.Estimating these effects is complicated because earnings are observed for employedindividuals only, and employment is...

Two very different approaches are used to explore the relation between market orientationand gender wage differentials in international data. More market orientation might be relatedto gender wage gaps via its effects on competition in product and labor markets and thegeneral absence of...

To investigate the size and the timing of the direct impact of participatory arrangements onbusiness performance, we assemble and analyze extraordinary daily data – for rejection,production and downtime rates for all operators in a single plant during a 35 month period,more than 77,000...

In public good provision, privileged groups enjoy the advantage that some of its membersfind it optimal to supply a positive amount of the public good. However, their inherentasymmetric nature may make the enforcement of cooperative behavior through informalsanctioning harder to accomplish...

The emergence of a transitional labor market offers new opportunities to workers, but at thesame time bears the risk of (new) inequalities. This paper deals with unequal chances on thetransitional labor market in the Netherlands, in particular for workers from the four largestimmigrant groups:...