This study uses panel data describing about 6,500 employees in a large international company to study the incentive effects of performance related pay. The company uses two performance related remuneration mechanisms. One is an individual "surprise" bonus payment. The other is a more structured...

Temporary contracts provide employers with a tool to screen potential new employees and have been shown to provide "stepping stones" into permanent employment for workers. For both reasons workers on temporary contracts have an incentive to provide more effort than permanent employees. Using...

This study applies rich data from the 2000 Swiss census to investigate the patterns of intergenerational education transmission for natives and second generation immigrants. The level of secondary schooling attained by youth aged 17 is related to their parents' educational outcomes using data on...

Using data on annual individual labor income from three representative panel datasets (German SOEP, British BHPS, Australian HILDA) we investigate a) the selectivity of item non-response (INR) and b) the impact of imputation as a prominent post-survey means to cope with this type of measurement...

Welfare-oriented analyses of economic outcome measures such as income and wealth generally rest on the assumption of pooled and equally shared resources among all household members. Yet the lack of individual-level data hampers the distribution of income and wealth within the household context....

This paper analyses the contribution of capital income to income inequality in a cross-national comparison. Using micro-data from the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) for three prominent panel studies, namely the BHPS for Great Britain, the SOEP for West Germany, and the PSID for the USA, a...

In the absence of closed-shops and discriminatory wage policies, union membership can be explained by the existence of social norms. We describe a model, incorporating institutional features of the German labour market, which explicitly allows for social custom effects in the determination of...

The accepted view among psychologists and economists alike is that economic well-being has a statistically significant but only weak effect on happiness/subjective well-being (SWB). This view is based almost entirely on weak relationships with household income. The paper uses household economic...