Informal contacts are extensively used by both firms and workers to find jobs and fill vacancies. The common wisdom in the economic literature is that jobs created through this channel are of better quality and pay higher wages than jobs created through formal methods. This paper explores the...

This paper studies the impact of NAFTA on informality and real wages in Mexico. Using a dynamic industry model with firm heterogeneity, it is predicted that import tariff elimination could reduce the incidence of informality by making more profitable to some firms to enter the formal sector,...

We investigate the effect of employer job security guarantees on employee perceptions of job security. Using linked employer-employee data from the 1998 British Workplace Employee Relations Survey, we find job security guarantees reduce employee perceptions of job insecurity. This finding is...

This paper examines the role of international trade, and specifically imports from low-wage countries, in determining patterns of job loss in U.S. manufacturing industries between 1992 and 2007. Motivated by intuitions from factor-proportions-inspired work on offshoring and heterogeneous firms...

This paper derives optimal employment contracts when workers are risk averse and there are employment and unemployment risks. Without income insurance, consumption rises during employment and falls during unemployment. Optimal employment contracts offer severance compensation to smooth...

The theory of equalizing differences suggests that employer provided pension benefits should be compensated by reduced wage benefits for an employee’s given produc-tivity potential. This paper presents an empirical analysis of compensating wage differentials for occupational pension scheme...

This paper studies the effect of product market competition on the explicit compensation packages that firms offer to their CEOs, executives and workers. We use a large sample of both traded and non-traded UK firms and exploit a quasi-natural experiment associated to an increase in competition....

We show that worker wellbeing is not only related to the amount of compensation workers receive but also how they receive it. While previous theoretical and empirical work has often been pre-occupied with individual performance-related pay, we here demonstrate a robust positive link between the...

Based upon unique survey data collected using respondent driven sampling methods, we investigate whether there is a gender pay gap among social entrepreneurs in the UK. We find that women as social entrepreneurs earn 29% less than their male colleagues, above the average UK gender pay gap of...

This paper reviews a growing literature investigating how ‘immigrant’ diversity relates to urban economic performance. As distinct from the labor-supply focus of much of the economics of immigration, this paper reviews work that examines how growing heterogeneity in the composition of the...