In many countries the shadow employment has a very high priority among policymakers. A new time series for this component of the labour market has been recently released by the Italian institute of statistics. Taken together they give the motivation and the occasion for a fresh analysis of the...

We examine experimentally how Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) respond to incentives and how they provide incentives in situations requiring trust and trustworthiness. As a control we compare the behavior of CEOs with the behavior of students. We find that CEOs are considerably more trusting and...

In this paper labour productivity growth and its impacts are studied at the industry level. The development of productivity is analysed in 54 industries in 14 EU countries and in the US between 1979 and 2001. The conclusion of the study is that the industry structure that leads to fast...

The article examines the optimal choice of monitoring intensity when workers face external incentives (incentives that are not provided by the firm), such as tips, satisfaction from working well, or the desire to build reputation in order to be more attractive to other employers. Increase in...

This paper highlights the social costs from non-price rationing of the labour force due to the minimum wage. By short-circuiting the ability of low reservation-wage workers to underbid high-reservation wage workers, the minimum wage interferes with the market's basic function of grouping the...

Recent studies found evidence for nominal wage rigidity during periods of relatively high wage inflation. It has been argued, however, that in an environment with low wage inflation, when nominal wage cuts become customary, workers’ opposition to nominal cuts would erode and, hence, firms...

Three issues are addressed in this paper. First, we use both household and macro data to establish how fast per capita consumption and incomes grew in Ghana in the 1990s. Second, we ask how much of the rise in incomes was due to rises in the level of human capital and how much reflected...