A gap in the displaced worker-training literature is that the post-retraining period has not been studied over the long term. The approach here will be to examine in-depth the experience of a selected few displaced worker trainees over a 20 to 25 year period following their training. With our...

We present evidence on the effect of social connections between workers and managers on productivity in the workplace. To evaluate whether the existence of social connections is beneficial to the firm's overall performance, we explore how the effects of social connections vary with the strength...

During the 1930s and 1940s, collective bargaining emerged as the workplace governance norm in much of the U.S. industrial sector. Following its peak in the 1950s, union density in the U.S. private sector fell steadily, to only 7.4 percent in 2006. Governance shifted from a formalized union norm...

Do employees fare better in firms they partly own? Examining workers' reviews of their employers on Glassdoor, we compare employee satisfaction between firms in which workers own company shares through an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) and conventional firms in which they do not. Focusing...

There is substantial evidence of minimum wage noncompliance in the US and the UK. In this paper, I compile new, comprehensive data on the costs minimum wage violators incur when detected. In both countries, the costs violators face upon detection are often little more than the money they saved...

This paper evaluates an Austrian manpower training program, which is highly innovative in its content and financing – and could therefore serve as a role model for other programs. In the late 1980s privatization and down-sizing of nationalized steel firms have lead to large-scale redundancies....

The paper provides a historical overview of the development of the initial characteristics of the standard employment contract in Germany from the middle of the 19th century until the beginning of World War I. The beginning of the welfare state in Germany took place during the 1880s on the basis...

Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory, where Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. County-level data from...

The paper provides a historical overview of the institutional development of the structural elements of the standard employment contract in Germany from the beginning of World War I until the outbreak of World War II. For this purpose, a model of the standard employment contract including...