Workers who hold a firm's stock make decisions other than those that pure capital owners would make, but there exist institutions and compensation packages that will generally lead workers to favor efficient firm decisions. Workers care about their firm-specific rents and may seek shares in...

This paper seeks to explain the greater hours worked by Americans compared to Germans in terms of forward-looking labor supply responses to differences in earnings inequality between the countries. We argue that workers choose current hours of work to gain promotions and advance in the...

The 1990s economic performance of the US suggests that the country may have the right mix of institutions and policies to be the peak capitalist economy in the new information economy. This paper develops criterion for judging peak status and examines whether the US fulfills these criterion. The...

This paper examines educational earnings differentials in Canada in the 1980s and compares changes in differentials to those in the United States. Our major finding is that the college/high school differential increased much less in Canada than in the United States. We also find that within...

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 study contrasts the labor market performance of the U.S. and OECD Europe in the 1980s and critically evaluates the view that the U.S. has generated more jobs because its labor market is more 'flexible'. The study finds that the greater employment expansion in the U.S. was associated with...

Works councils, found in most Western European economies, are elected bodies of employees with rights to information, consultation, and in some cases co-determination of employment conditions at local workplaces, mandated by law. Many European employers and unions believe that councils improve...

This paper studies the stability of centralized wage-setting systems in light of the on-going decentralization of labor relations in much of the Western world. It takes the decline of peak level bargaining in Sweden, the traditional archetype of centralized collective bargaining, as its key case...