The occupational skill structure depends on the business cycle if employers respond to shortages of applicants during upturns by lowering their hiring standards. Devereux uses this implication to construct empirical tests for the notion of hiring standards adjustment (the so-called Reder...

The study investigates associations, first, between a firm's intellectual capital and market value, and second, between a firm's intellectual capital and financial performance in the context of Bangladeshi companies selected from three different industries - banking, textiles, and...

In this lecture I first give an explanation for invidious preferences based on the (evolutionary) competition for resources. Then I show that these preferences have wide ranging and empirically relevant effects on labor markets, such as: workplace skill segregation, gradual promotions, wage...

The micro- and macroeconomic effects of the declining power of trade unions have been hotly debated by economists and policymakers. Nevertheless, the empirical evidence shows that the impact of the decline on economic aggregates and firm performance is not an overwhelming cause for concern....

This paper shows that firms in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) provide training to their workers less frequently than firms in other regions and yet seem to be more in need of it. Utilizing firm level data from the Enterprise Surveys for over 100 countries, it attempts to explain that...

There is little evidence as to the effectiveness of incentives for the conversion of fixed-term contracts into permanent jobs. We aim at filling this gap by studying a recent Italian program which provides benefits for employers who convert contracts for workers in specific demographic groups...

Correspondence studies are nowadays viewed as the most compelling avenue to test for hiring discrimination. However, these studies suffer from one fundamental methodological problem, as formulated by Heckman and Siegelman (The Urban Institute audit studies: Their methods and findings. In M. Fix,...

With a sample of 700 future public sector primary teachers in India, a Discrete Choice Experiment is used to measure job preferences, particularly regarding location. General skills are also tested. Urban origin teachers and women are more averse to remote locations than rural origin teachers...

This paper presents a case study on reforming a very dysfunctional labor market with a deep insider-outsider divide, namely the Spanish case. We show how a dual market, with permanent and temporary employees, makes real reform much harder, and leads to purely marginal changes that do not alter...

Efficiency wages theories argue that the threat of firing, coupled with a high unemployment rate, is a mechanism that discourages employee shirking in asymmetric information contexts. Our empirical analysis aims to test the role of unemployment as a worker discipline device, considering the...