The creeping stock market collapse eroded the wealth of funded pension systems. This led to political tensions between generations due to the fuzzy definition of property rights on the pension funds wealth. We argue that this problem can best be resolved by the introduction of generational...

Are public sector jobs better than private sector jobs? To answer this question, this paper investigates observed differences in job satisfaction between public- and private-sector workers and disentangles the effect of worker sorting from the one caused by sector-specific job characteristics. A...

Today, Europe is a continent of low participation, low employment labor markets. Many observers would like to blame poor employment outcomes on the Euro or on austerity. But these are dangerous distractions from real problems that constitute imperatives for structural reform. There are...

Contributing to a social cause can be an important driver for workers in the public and non-profit sector as well as in firms that engage in Corporate Social Responsibility activities. This paper compares the effectiveness of social incentives to financial incentives using an online real effort...

While most of the literature on employment protection has focused on government-mandated severance pay, it has recently been documented that a substantial share of severance payments derives from private contracts or collective agreements. This paper studies the determination of these payments....

Employer mandates and other labor demand/supply shocks typically have small effects on wages and employment. These effects should be more discernible using data on employment transitions and wages among new hires rather than incumbents. The Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) dataset provides...

This study uses restricted-access employer-level microdata from the National Compensation Survey to examine the relationship between automatic enrollment and employee compensation. By boosting plan participation, automatic enrollment has the potential to increase employer defined contribution...

In light of the declining pension coverage of low-income workers, policy makers have discussed requiring all employers to offer individual retirement accounts, similar to defined contribution plans. How likely to participate are workers who currently do not have access to a pension plan? We...

This study investigates the prevalence and severity of job immobility induced by the provision of employer-sponsored health insurance – a phenomenon known as 'job-lock'. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth from 1994 to 2010, job-lock is identified by measuring the impact...

This paper examines the economic effects of employment protection legislation in a sample of developed and developing countries. By implementing a difference-in-differences test, we lessen the potentially severe endogeneity and omitted variable problems associated with cross-country regressions....