By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women’s happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women’s declining relative well-being...

In recent years the British National Health Service (NHS) has experienced an acute shortage of qualified nurses. This has placed issues of recruitment and retention in the profession high on the political agenda. In this Paper, we investigate the determinants of job satisfaction for nurses and...

This paper studies the impact of a selective extension of unemployment benefit duration on the incidence of unemployment in Austria. As the new law applies only to elderly workers in certain regions of the country after June 1988, a quasi-experimental situation is created. Unemployment entry is...

We propose a general framework for analyzing and comparing ownership structures with respect to creating incentives for co-operative behavior (e.g. efficient investment) in long-run relationships. We generalize models by Garvey (1995), Halonen (2002), and Baker, Gibbons and Murphy (2002) and...

This paper studies the strategic interaction between a foreign direct investor and a host country. We analyse how the investor can use his control rights to protect his investment, if he faces the risk of ‘creeping expropriation’ once his investment is sunk. It is shown that this hold-up...

We exploit time variation in the degree of development of local credit markets and matched employer-employee data to assess the role of the firm as an internal credit market. In less developed local credit markets firms can offer a flatter wage-tenure profile than firms in more developed credit...

The need for locational competition among labour markets arises when labour is immobile. At the same time market clearing under such conditions can lead to wage and income variability. In such cases demand for insurance against regional shocks arises, which can be provided by nationwide...

Existing theories of unions emphasize their impact on wage levels relative to the opportunity cost of leisure. This paper explores the possibility that monopoly unions provide income insurance against idiosyncratic wage variability. An optimal union contract is characterized by real wage and...

Implicit contract theory has been successful in explaining wage rigidity but not unemployment. We argue that the theory has paid insufficient attention to (i) the general equilibrium aspects and (ii) constraints limiting the set of feasible contracts. Implicit, as opposed to explicit contracts,...

Empirical evidence on the labour market performance of immigrants shows that migrant workers suffer from an initial earnings disadvantage compared to observationally equivalent native workers, but that their subsequent earnings tend to increase faster than native earnings. Economists usually try...