France has experienced massive changes in its regulation of working time during the last decade. These changes generate natural experiments that may help to study a variety of issues in labor economics, including work sharing effect on job creation or productivity, labor relations or adaptation...

When labor markets are imperfectly competitive, firms may be willing to finance general training if the wage structure is compressed, that is, if the increase of productivity after training is greater than the increase in pay. We propose a novel way of testing this proposition, which exploits...

The research area of the new economics of personnel has a short but important and insightful history. Theory ahead of measurement asks for testing newly developed human resource concepts. These tests often need detailed firm-specific data. Repetition and comparison of results is key in finding...

We analyse data from personnel records of a large firm producing energy and telecommunication and test for the effect of deviations between required and attained education of workers. Required education is measured as hiring standards set by the firm. We find the usual effects of over- and...

This paper tests two hypotheses from the theory of elimination tournaments: (i) that uneven tournaments, where the contestants are ex ante heterogeneous, entail lower effort exertion; this is a prediction from agency theory that has not been tested empirically before; and (ii) whether incentives...

Building upon a continuous-time model of search with Nash bargaining in a stationary environment, we analyze the effect of changes in minimum wages on labor market outcomes and welfare. While minimum wage increases invariably lead to employment losses in our model, they may be welfare-improving...

We formulate an empirical model of promotion with dynamic self-selection where the current promotion probability depends on the hierarchical level in the firm, individual human capital, unobserved (to the econometrician) individual specific attributes, time varying firm specific variables (firm...

Using data from the British Household Panel Survey from 1991 to 1996, the authors investigate the impact of union coverage on work-related training and how the union-training link affects wages and wage growth for a sample of full-time men. Relative to uncovered workers, union-covered men are...

We use linked data for 1,460 workplaces and 19,853 employees from the Workplace Employee Relations Survey 1998 to analyse the incidence and duration of employee training in Britain. We find training to be positively associated with having a recognised vocational qualification and current union...

This paper develops a multi-period model, in which workers are matched with jobs according to imperfect educational signals and in which their subsequent productivities depend on both their inherent ability and on the quality of the job match. It outlines a sequential process, in which underpaid...