In this paper, we investigate the influence of the education of entrepreneurs, which we hypothesise to be a signal of talent, on the adoption of variable pay (VP) schemes in the Italian economy. We estimate to what extent differences in the diffusion of VP between Italian firms reflect...

The pre-war approaches to trade unions were mainly based on the theoretical and methodological viewpoints of early institutional economics. Trade unions were conceived of as politico-economic organizations whose members were motivated by relative comparisons and also were concerned with issues...

In 1990 a reform in Italy has modified the employment protection legislation for employees of small firms (with fewer than 16 employees) making much more costly for firms to dismiss workers, while leaving unchanged the employment protection in large firms. Using a sample of administrative data...

The paper discusses how and why the theories of neo-classical economics are inadequate to provide a framework to human resource management and therefore must give way to dynamic gradual optimization procedure based on the principles of bounded rationality and satisficing behaviour in dealing...

Empirical work on Akerlof’s theory of gift exchange in labor markets has concentrated on the fair wage-effort hypothesis. In fact, however, the theory also contains a social component that stipulates that homogenous agents that are employed for the same wage level will exert more effort,...

This paper analysed the OECD data on employment protection for 23 OECD countries over the time span 1990-2008 on the basis of alternative dynamic panel data models and panel causality tests and examines the validity of the neo-liberal argument that strictness of employment protection hurts...

The aim of this paper is to examine the moderating effect of social support (which may be supervisory, friends, family and relatives) on the relationship of personal financial constraints and job stress relationship. Sample consists of 294 respondents from randomly selected 28 branches of 22...

This paper uses the Schools and Staffing Survey to examine the determinants of teacher salaries in the U.S. using a spatial econometric framework. These determinants include teacher salaries in nearby districts, union activity in the district, union activity in neighboring districts, and other...

This paper examines the state of labour protection in four countries (UK, USA, France and Germany) during 1970-2006. It supports the contention of the legal-origin theory that UK and USA (common law countries) intervene less in the labour market and grant less protection to labourers. It also...

Bedevilling the ongoing debate about changes in real-incomes in late-medieval western Europe, especially during the so-called ‘Golden Age of the Labourer’, is the very troubling issue of ‘wage-stickiness’. The standard and long-traditional explanation for this supposed ‘Golden Age’...