Several studies show that employees with firm-specific skills are more likely to be covered by employer-sponsored pension schemes than workers with general skills. Therefore it can be expected that workers with firm-specific skills retire earlier. This paper tests this prediction using US data...

We estimate the elasticity of enrollment into higher education with respect to the amount of means tested student aid (BAfoeG) provided by the federal government using the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP). Potential student aid is derived on the basis of a detailed tax-benefit microsimulation...

Although an inverse relationship between sickness absence and unemployment has beendocumented in a number of studies using either quarterly or annual data from differentcountries with varying institutional frameworks, it is not yet clear whether this empiricalregularity is due to changes in the...

We investigate a team setting in which workers have different degrees of commitment to theoutcome of their work. We show that if there are complementarities in production and if theteam manager has some information about team members, interventions that the managerundertakes in order to assure...

Implementing performance pay requires that workers' output be measured. Whenmeasurement costs differ among firms, those with a measurement cost advantage choose toimplement performance pay. They attract the best workers, and both the level and variabilityof compensation are higher at these firms...

In many environments, tournaments can elicit more effort from workers, except perhapswhen workers can sabotage each other. Because it is hard to separate effort, ability andoutput in many real workplace settings, the empirical evidence on the incentive effect oftournaments is thin...