Do employers and workers underbid prevailing wages if there is unemployment? Do employers take advantage of workers’ underbidding by lowering wages? We hypothesize that under conditions of incomplete labor contracts wage levels may positively affect workers’ propensity to cooperate. This, in...

The objective of the paper is to answer an often-asked question : if tariff rates are reduced, what will happen to wage inequality ? We consider two types of wage inequality : between occupations (skills premium), and between industries. We use two large data bases of wage inequality that have...

This paper analyses labour market liberalisation and government commitment to economic reforms in Zimbabwe. The paper briefly analyses the economic policies that were implemented between 1980 and 1990 that were characterised by massive interventions in the labour market. It problematises the...

– This paper examines the phenomenon of the underground economy. We analyze the choice by firms and workers to carry out their economic activities within the formal economy context (regular economy) or the underground economy context (irregular economy). We assume that there are two types of...

This paper provides an assessment of employment and working conditions in Latvia before and immediately after the EU accession. The issues addressed include self-employment, multiple jobs, fixed-term contracts, unreported wages, overtime, unsocial working hours, health and safety at work, social...

This paper uses panel data from 1989 to 1995 on blue-collar workers in Finnish manufacturing industries and their establishments to assess the extent to which hours of work are affected by individual or establishment characteristics - observed as well as unobserved. We argue that recent research...

We utilize a large establishment-level panel dataset to explore the links between gross job flows and gross worker flows. Our findings have relevance for models of job creation and job destruction, and labour reallocation. We find churning flows (the difference between worker and job flows at...

Aggregate productivity growth can be decomposed into growth within establishments, between establishments, and the impact of entering and exiting establishments. We demonstrate that such a productivity decomposition formula can also be used for studying intraestablishment restructuring through...