Professional experts offer advice with the objective of appearing well informed. Their ability is evaluated on the basis of the advice given and the realized state of the world. We model this situation as a reputational cheap-talk game with continuous signal, state, and ability type spaces....

Seit zwei Jahrzehnten wird in Deutschland wie in Frankreich eine Sozialpolitik betrieben, die größtenteils auf einer gemeinsamen Einschätzung der Probleme und Herausforderungen beruht, die sich aus der zunehmenden Alterung der Gesellschaft und dem Druck zu mehr Wettbewerbsfähigkeit und...

Tournaments are well known to be vulnerable to collusion as shown by the impossibility theorem in Ishiguro (2004), which asserts that efficient effort levels are impossible to be implemented through a collusion-proof contract. However, we argue that this impossibility is a product of simple...

Using the Hodrick-Prescott filter, this paper examines the cyclical properties of the Italian labour market. Its main contribution is the empirical analysis of three different labour inputs - regular employees, regular self-employed and underground workers. Results from VAR models support the...

When it comes to retirement income policy, there is a general perception that workers have full 40-year working careers before retiring. Further, it is generally assumed that workers with low lifetime earnings have low earnings in each year during a normal working career. The basic research...

This paper produces first econometric estimates for Germany of the contemporanous wage gap associated with Temporary Help Service (THS) employment, as well as the long-term effects of THS work on the future earnings of workers. In addition, we present evidence showing that average male real...

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...

Based on a new panel dataset created in close cooperation with one of the largest temporary help agencies (THAs) in Germany, this paper presents novel evidence on key aspects of temporary agency work, a segment of the labor market that despite its growing importance remains underresearched. In...