Using data for various years, including new data for 1973–84, the authors examine the scope, nature, determinants, and effects of Japanese employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs). In 1988, of firms listed on Japan's eight stock exchange markets, 91% had an ESOP, and the average...

Does competitive pressure foster innovation? Technical progress consists of numerous small improvements made upon the existing technology continuous improvement and innovative activities aiming at entirely new technology (discrete innovation). Continuous improvement is often of limited relevance...

This paper provides novel evidence on the long-term effect of the Great Recession on the quality of jobs, in particular whether the Great Recession results in the replacement of "good jobs" (characterized by high wage/benefit, job security, and opportunity for training and development) with "bad...

This paper begins by constructing a team-theoretical model of organizational adaptation and coordination with three distinct task coordination modes: vertical control, horizontal coordination, and hybrid coordination. The model is then used to provide fresh insights on complementarities...

Using Danish linked employer–employee data, we find that: (i) exposing the worker to physical hazards leads to a 3 percentage point increase in the probability of voluntary turnover from the average rate of 18%; (ii) working in night shift results in an 11-percentage point hike; and (iii)...

We study the impact of social identity on worker competition by exploiting the exogenous variations in workers' origins and the well-documented social divide between urban resident workers and rural migrant workers in large urban Chinese firms. We analyze data on weekly output, individual...

The authors use the econometric case study method to investigate the direct impact of offline teams on productivity in a non-unionized subsidiary of a multinational firm from January 1999 through November 2001. They analyze daily data on rejection, production, and downtime rates for both team...

This paper provides novel evidence on the causal effect on female employment of labor market deregulation by using the 1985 amendments to the Labor Standards Law (LSL) in Japan as a natural experiment. The original LSL of 1947 prohibited women from working overtime exceeding two hours a day; six...

We study a warehouse that changes its incentive plan from a group plan to an individual plan. We focus on the impact that the change had on productivity, allocation of time to different tasks, and helping across departments. Utilizing time series methods we find that average productivity...

Using three different waves of a survey on compensation practices from 2005, 2007, and 2010, we study the dynamics of incentive plans. We describe that firms frequently discontinue incentive plans and often change performance measures and organizational levels of performance measurement. The...