CEO incentive contracts are commonplace in China but their incidence varies significantly across Chinese cities. We show that city and provincial policy experiments help explain this variance. We examine the role of two policy experiments: the use of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to attract...

This paper uses data from the 1998 Technical Graduates Employers Survey, combined with post-survey financial data, to examine the effects of high-level skill shortages on firm-level performance in the UK. We focus specifically on enterprise difficulties in recruiting engineers and scientists...

It has long been argued that equality of opportunity brings business benefits and that it is in employers’ interest to implement policy to promote equality of opportunity. We present new evidence on this issue from the Workplace Employment Relations Survey 2004. There do not appear to be large...

Using nationally representative workplace surveys we examine the relationship between unionization and workplace financial performance in Britain and France. We find that union bargaining is detrimental to workplace performance in Britain and that this effect is larger when unionization is...

Data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey are analysed to investigate the processes and outcomes of pay setting for the largest occupational group in a representative sample of all but the smallest British workplaces. The effects of inflation, changes in labour demand and supply,...

The past quarter century in Britain has seen a concurrent decline in collective expressions of conflict and growth in the individualised expression of conflict, most transparently manifest in a dramatic fall in the incidence of strikes and a rising tide of claims to the Employment Tribunal. This...

Low pay is concentrated in lower-skilled occupations. But the factors that affect pay levels in these occupations are different from those that affect the pay of the higher skilled. The paper used the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey to examine the determinants of pay in lower-skilled...

In the context of the skill-biased technological revolution associated with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), firms with relatively high (low) proportions of skilled workers can be expected to have a comparative advantage (disadvantage) in minimising the costs both of ICT...

The recession of the early 1990s saw London shift from being one of the best performing regions in terms of unemployment to one of the worst. This paper takes employing units (workplaces) as the primary unit of labour demand and uses evidence from them to test potential explanations for London's...

For most of the twentieth century, collective bargaining provided the terms on which labour was commonly employed in Britain. However, the quarter century since 1980 has seen the collapse of collectivism as the main way of regulating employment. Our argument is that the tacit settlement between...