The growing divergence in U.S. employee relations is described through a review of national and state-level changes to employment protection laws. Major employment laws are reviewed, as are the significant exceptions to the laws, and exemptions to the exceptions. Major regulatory actions, as...

From a theoretical viewpoint, there can be market failures resulting in an underprovision of occupational health and safety. Works councils may help mitigate these failures. Using establishment data from Germany, our empirical analysis confirms that the incidence of a works council is...

While trade unions have been studied in detail, there is virtually no economics research on employer associations (EAs), trade unions' counterparts in many countries. However, besides conducting collective bargaining, EAs perform several other activities that can in uence economic outcomes,...

Social partners (trade unions and employers' associations) shape labour institutions and economic and social outcomes in many countries. In this paper, we argue that, when examining social partners' representativeness, it is important to consider both affiliation and dissimilarity measures. The...

This chapter reviews the economic effects of employee representation with statutory consultation and information rights at the workplace, the works councils. The chapter summarises the international literature which is heavily skewed towards the German case. This review focuses, first, on the...

Information and communication technology (ICT) challenges traditional assumptions about the capacity to manage workers beyond organizational and physical boundaries. A typology connects a variety of non-traditional work organizations made possible by ICT, including offshoring, outsourcing,...

The varieties-of-capitalism (VoC) approach distinguishes liberal market economies (LMEs) such as the USA and coordinated market economies (CMEs) such as Germany based on institutional differences in terms of corporate governance, industrial relations, company relations as well as education and...

What drives investment in automation technologies? This paper documents a positive relationship between labor-friendly institutions and investment in in- dustrial robots in a sample of developing and advanced economies. Institutions explain a substantial share of cross-country variation in...

The interplay between labor institutions and the firm-level adoption of new technologies such as robotics and other advanced digital tools remains poorly understood. Using a cross-sectional sample of more than 20000 European establishments, this paper documents a positive association between...

The teleworkability of jobs - whether they can and will be performed remotely - has been increasingly contested in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. To explain which jobs are teleworkable and why, we emphasize the institutional context of a job, including differences among firms, union...