To analyze the effect of health on work, many studies use a simple self-assessed health measure based upon a question such as "do you have an impairment or health problem limiting the kind or amount of work you can do?" A possible drawback of such a measure is the possibility that different...

How have labor market institutions and welfare-state transfers affected jobs and productivity in Western Europe, relative to industrialized Pacific Rim countries? Orthodox criticisms of European government institutions are right in some cases and wrong in others. Protectionist labor-market...

We examine the link between equity risk premiums and demographic changes using a very long sample over the twentieth century for the US, Japan, UK, Germany and France, and a shorter sample covering the last third of the twentieth century for fifteen countries. We find that demographic variables...

Over the last twenty years the wage-education relationships in the US and Germany have evolved very differently, while the education composition of employment has evolved in a surprisingly parallel fashion. In this paper, we propose and test an explanation to these conflicting patterns. The...

Based on a survey questionnaire administered to 1478 R&D labs in the U.S. manufacturing sector in 1994, we find that firms typically protect the profits due to invention with a range of mechanisms, including patents, secrecy, lead time advantages and the use of complementary marketing and...

By exploiting establishment-level data, this paper sheds new light on the source of the changes in the structure of production, wages, and employment that have occurred over the last several decades. Based on theoretical work by Caselli (1999) and Kremer and Maskin (1996), we focus on...

Several analysts claim that firms have been using more flexible work arrangements in order to contain the costly adjustment of labor to changes in economic conditions. In particular, temporary help supply (THS) employment has increased dramatically in the last ten years. However, there is only...

This paper reports the results of a field study examining the use of TQM at 15 firms. The sample is drawn from winners and finalists of the RIT/USA Today Quality Cup. The authors interviewed 75 employees (5 per firm) including 14 executives, 44 middle managers, and 17 front line workers. The...

We argue that greater misallocation is a key driver of the worse management practices in Mexico compared to the US. These management practices are strongly associated with higher productivity, growth, trade, and innovation. One indicator of greater misallocation in Mexico is the weaker...