The self-employed are substantially more satisfied with their work than employed persons. We document this relationship for 23 countries and show that the higher job satisfaction can directly be attributed to the greater autonomy that self-employed persons enjoy. "Being your own boss" seems to...

It is typically assumed that people engage in entrepreneurship because there are profits to be made. In contrast to this view, this paper argues that entrepreneurship is more adequately characterized as a non-profit-seeking activity. Evidence from a broad range of authors and academic fields is...

One can be independent, or subject to decisions made by others. This paper empirically tests whether individuals attach an intrinsic value to the institutional difference between independence and hierarchy. Taking self-employment as an important case of independence, it is shown that the...

This paper examines the evolution of female labor market outcomes from 1987 to 2008 by assessing the role of changing labor demand requirements in four developing countries: Brazil, Mexico, India and Thailand. The results highlight the importance of structural change in reducing gender...

In this paper we study experimentally four remedies to overcome inefficiencies that arise from the incompleteness of contracts. These remedies are reciprocity, repeated game effects, social embeddedness, and incentive contracts. In our baseline treatment we find that reciprocity is a powerful...

Recently, a number of authors have argued that the standard search model cannot generate the observed business-cycle-frequency fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies, given shocks of a plausible magnitude. We use data on the cost of vacancy creation and cyclicality of wages to identify...

In this chapter we provide a selective survey of experiments to investigate the potential of social motivations in explaining labour market phenomena. We argue that laboratory experiments are a useful instrument to explore issues in labour market theory and personnel economics. Our starting...

In 1997, the Swiss government introduced active labor market programs on a large scale to improve the job chances of unemployed workers. This paper evaluates the effect of these programs on the duration of unemployment. Our evaluation methodology allows for selectivity affecting the inflow into...

This paper investigates how precisely short-term, job-search oriented training programs as opposed to long-term, human capital intensive training programs work. We evaluate and compare their effects on time until job entry, stability of employment, and earnings. Further, we examine the...

The paper proposes a new estimator for the fixed effects ordered logit model. In contrast to existing methods, the new procedure allows estimating the thresholds. The empirical relevance and simplicity of implementation is illustrated in an application to the effect of unemployment on life...