This paper documents the large cross-country differences in labor institutions that make them a candidate explanatory factor for the divergent economic performance of countries and reviews what economists have learned about the effects of these institutions on economic outcomes. It identifies...

The problems/need for representation and participation reported by workers vary across workplaces and by types of jobs. Workers with greater workplace needs are more desirous of unions but their preferences are fine-grained. Workers want unions to negotiate wages and work conditions and for...

What enables some employee ownership firms to overcome the free rider problem and motivate employees to improve performance? This study analyzes the role of human resource policies in the performance of employee ownership companies, using employee survey data from 14 companies and a national...

The extension of information and communication technologies to economic activity is changing the labour market in important ways. This article shows that computerization and use of the Internet are associated with greater hours worked as well as higher wages; that IT occupations are rapidly...

The distribution of earnings and the distribution of skills vary widely among advanced countries, with the major English-speaking countries, the US, UK, and Canada, having much greater inequality in both earnings and skills than continental European Union countries. This raises the possibility...

This paper examines the use and consequences of shared compensation plans (profit sharing, profit related pay, SAYE schemes and company stock option plans) in a sample of UK workplaces and firms in the 1990s. The use of these plans has increased over time, in part in response to government...

Many business, academic, and scientific groups have recommended that the Congress substantially increase R&D spending in the near future. President Bush’s American Competitiveness Initiative calls for a doubling of spending over the next decade in selected agencies that deal with the physical...

In this paper I examine both the positive and negative aspects of the US labor market response to the economic world of the 1980s/1990s. I review the economic development that created difficulties in the US and other advanced economies post the first oil shock; consider how a decentralised labor...

Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidizethe price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a newsurvey of employees in a multinational with a share ownership plan, we find considerablevariation in joining among...

We are attentive to labor practices in foreign lands but as the quotations above indicate, we are unsure about the lessons to be drawn from these practices. Will something that works `over there'' work here, or will it fail to `fit'' our ways of doing things? Which practices will adapt or evolve...