Both common macroeconomic shocks and country-specific developments have subjected the flexibility of wage setting mechanisms in the euro area to a stress test in recent years. Against this background, this paper takes a fresh look at wage flexibility in EMU and attempts to draw a few lessons...

Economists have long been studying the shares of labour and capital in income. Surprisingly, no such empirical studies exist for Australia. This paper looks at a number of variables that can affect labour’s share in income: unemployment, capacity utilisation, growth rate of GDP and changes in...

Tipping is a significant economic activity (tips in the US food industry alone amount to about $42 billion annually) that was claimed to improve service quality and increase economic efficiency, because it gives incentives to provide excellent service, and therefore allows to avoid costly...

Theories of social comparison have a long presence in the social sciences and have provided many useful insights. In economics, the idea of comparison, aspiration or relative income belongs to this theoretical framework. The first systematic usages of this idea can be found in the works of...

This article re-examines Earl Hamilton’s famous 1929 thesis on ‘Profit Inflation’ and the ‘birth of modern industrial capitalism’: namely, that the inflationary forces of the Price Revolution era produced a widening gap between prices and wages, thus providing industrial entrepreneurs...

Mit der zeitlichen Flexibilisierung der Arbeitsmärkte und dem damit verbundenen Rückzug des Normalarbeitstages treten neue Muster von Arbeitszeit auf. Auf Basis der deutschen Zeitbudgeterhebung 1991/92 sollen Arbeitszeiten von Selbständigen und abhängig Beschäftigten untersucht werden....

State interventions into Labour policies in India are directed towards ensuring both job security and income security. In this paper we look at likely impact of such policies. The laws are found to serve the organised workers primarily while large masses of unorganised workers are without any...

The aim of this paper is to study in a comprehensive way and with the best and most updated information available the size, evolution, characteristics and welfare implications of low wages in Spain from 1994 to2004. In order to do so we have exploited in a consistent way the 8 waves of the...

This paper analyses the flexibility of the Finnish labour markets from the microeconomic perspective by focusing on individual-level wage changes for job stayers. The study covers the private sector workers by using three separate data sets obtained from payroll records of employers’...

The article examines the firm's choice of incentives when workers face additional incentives (“external incentives”) to those provided by the firm, such as building reputation that improves the workers' prospects with other employers, or satisfaction from working well. Surprisingly, the firm...