Firms' inability to monitor their employees' search effort forces a tradeoff between risk-bearing and incentive considerations when designing employment-related insurance. Since the provision of insurance against firm-specific shocks adversely affects workers' incentives to find better jobs, the...

Usinga detailed sample of semi-skilled production workers we find that holding a wide range of personal and job-related characteristics constant, workers assigned to more complex jobs seem to be more likely to quit than are workers assigned to simpler jobs. Job complexity has no discernible...

We analyze the role of implicit contracts' (that is, informal agreements supported byquot; reputation rather than law) both within firms, for example in employment relationships between them, for example as hand-in-glove supplier relationships. We find that the optimalquot; organizational form...

This paper analyzes the relation of pension coverage and key plan characteristics to measures of union membership and strength, and to related interactions. The large and significant relationships which are found cannot be explained by, and are often inconsistent with, predictions obtained by...

7mplicit contracts resolve the distribution of uncertainty and utilization of specific human capital between risk averse workers and less risk averse firms. Incomplete contracts are required to yield involuntary layoffs in contract markets: otherwise, contracts are efficient and pareto optimal...

This study investigates where and when last-in-first-out permanent layoff policies seem to go hand in hand with compensation policies under which the net value of senior workers appears to be less than that of their junior peers. The investigation relies upon both the approximately 260 usable...

This paper employs a game-theoretic framework and a comparative historical analysis to study the impact of the Great Depression on corporate welfarism,' i.e., employers' voluntary provisions of non-wage benefits, greater employment security, and employee representation to their blue-collar...

The paper studies how a person's concern for a future career may influence his or her incentives to put in effort or make decisions on the job. In the model, the person's productive abilities are revealed over time through observations of performance. There are no explicit output contingent...

We use a simple theoretical framework and a randomized manipulation of access to information on peers' wages to provide new evidence on the effects of relative pay on individual job satisfaction and job search intentions. A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California (UC)...

In this paper we test whether procrastination and planning problems affect the performance, compensation and work satisfaction among employees. We conducted a randomized controlled experiment with a bank in Colombia to change the frequency and intensity with which employees received reminders...