We present evidence on the effect of social connections between workers and managers on productivity in the workplace. To evaluate whether the existence of social connections is beneficial to the firm's overall performance, we explore how the effects of social connections vary with the strength...

Empirical studies on information communication technologies (ICT) typically aggregate the informationʺ and communicationʺ components together. We show theoretically and empirically that these have very different effects on the empowerment of employees, and by extension on wage inequality. If...

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

Little is known about the relationship between family firms and their employees. This paper aims to close this gap. We distinguish between family management and family ownership as two dimensions of family firms and analyze their respective influence on downsizing. Our findings show that family...

Legal rules governing the employer-employee relationship are many and varied. Economic analysis has illuminated both the efficiency and the effects on employee welfare of such rules, as described in this paper. Topics addressed include workplace safety mandates, compensation systems for...

The authors use a labor supply; relative pay; experimental economics laboratory experiment to examine the impact of relative wages on labor supply. They test the hypothesis that, ceteris paribus, making a given wage high (low) relative to other wage levels will lead to an increase (decrease) in...