According to the German disability law, or Schwerbehindertengesetz, either six percent of all jobs in an establishment must be occupied by disabled empoyees or the firm has to pay a penalty of DM 200 per month for every job under consideration. This note reports results from the first...

This paper examines the pattern of employment adjustment in Portugal. First, the issue is addressed using a long time series of aggregate data. Although the employment data show persistence, there is nonetheless a fairly rapid rate of employment adjustment. Second, a much shorter time series of...

This paper uses a combination of workplace and matched-employee workplace data from the British 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey to examine the impact of unions and firm-provided training (incidence, intensity/coverage, and duration) on establishment performance. The performance effects...

An interesting aspect of British research on unions based on the Workplace Industrial/ Employment Relations Surveys has been the apparent shift in union impact on establishment performance in the decade of the 1990s compared with the 1980s – and the recent scramble to explain the phenomenon....

German law guaranteeing works councils is not a datum. The thrust of legislation has changed significantly on a number of occasions since 1920. The most recent legal change in the form of the Works Constitution Reform Act marks a controversial swing in favor of works council formation and...

The present paper uses a combination of workplace and linked employee-workplace data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey and the 2004 Workplace Employment Relations Survey to examine the impact of unions on training incidence, training intensity/coverage, and training duration. It...

This empirical paper documents the relationship between composition of a firm's workforce (with a special focus on age and gender) and its performance (productivity and profitability) for a large representative sample of enterprises from manufacturing industries in Germany. We use unique newly...

This paper updates the major study by Macpherson and Hirsch (1995) of the effect of the gender composition of occupations on female (and male) earnings. Using large representative national samples of employees from the Current Population Survey, cross-sectional estimates of the impact of...

Alternative work arrangements (AWAs), such as contracting, consulting, and temporary work, have been criticized as providing only atypical, even precarious, employment. Yet they may also allow workers to locate suitable job matches. Exploiting data from all four Contingent and Alternative...

Although the adverse labor market effects of economic recessions have been well documented, a notable omission in the literature is how recessions impact workers' job match quality. This paper considers the short and longer-term losses in productivity associated with the job changing brought in...