Employer-provided severance pay in the U.S. emerged among salaried workers during the Great Depression as an alternative to modest advance notice and expanded in the late 1950s and 1960s, especially among union (hourly) workers. A variety of sources are employed to estimate variations in...

The potentially adverse labor market effects of severance pay mandates are a continuing source of policy concern. In a seminal study, Lazear (1990) found that contract avoidance of severance pay firing costs was theoretically simple – a bonding scheme would do – but that empirically the...

Severance pay mandates are an appealing job displacement insurance strategy in developing countries, which have only modest government administrative capacities, but they carry the threat of adverse indirect effects. A critical review of the empirical literature reveals that severance benefit...

Economists have concerns about the firing cost implications of mandated severance plans. Analysis reveals that predicted severance plan consequences depend critically on the precise structure of the plan. Whether governments mandate (i) severance insurance plans or (ii) severance savings plans...

We study the relationship between outside options and workers' motivation to exert effort. We evaluate changes in outside options arising from age and experience cutoffs in the Austrian unemployment insurance (UI) system, and use absenteeism as a proxy for worker effort. Results indicate that a...

Using German establishment data, we show that the relationship between intensity of performance pay and intensity of applicant screening depends on the nature of production. In establishments with increased multitasking, performance pay is positively associated with applicant screening. By...

I develop an intra-firm theory of group design and teamwork in the presence of peer effects. The purpose is to understand the interlinkages between intra-firm group formation and the extent of wage dispersion within the firm. Given a set of heterogeneous workers, the manager faces the challenge...

Promotion tournaments play an important role for the provision of incentives in firms. In this paper, we extend research on single-stage rank-order tournaments and analyze behavior in multi-stage elimination tournaments. The main treatment of our laboratory experiment is a two-stage tournament...

Job-to-job turnover provides a way for employers to escape statutory firing costs, as unprofitable workers may willfully quit their job on receiving an outside offer, thus sparing their incumbent employer the firing costs. Furthermore, employers can induce their unprofitable workers to accept...

Severance pay, a fixed-sum payment to workers at job separation, has been the focus of intense policy concern for the last several decades, but much of this concern is unearned. The design of the ideal separation package is outlined and severance pay emerges as a natural component of job...