do employees sickness absences react to a change in costs for firms evidence from a natural experiment we analyse the impact of a social security reform that changed the costs incurred by firms due to sickness absences the reform abolished a compulsory insurance for firms which insured them against the wages paid to sick blue collar workers during the first year after its introduction we estimate that the reform resulted in about 6 3 percent fewer sickness absences and in about 8 6 percent fewer absence days we do not find evidence for changes in hiring or firing and we find only limited workforce composition changes we do not find spillover effects on the absences of white collar workers robustness checks confirm these results

who suffers the penalty a panel data analysis of earnings gaps in vietnam in spite of its predominant economic weight in developing countries little is known about the informal sector earnings structure compared to that of the formal sector taking advantage of the rich vhlss dataset in vietnam in particular its three wave panel data 2002 2004 2006 we assess the magnitude of various formal informal earnings gaps while addressing heterogeneity at three different levels the worker the job wage employment vs self employment and the earnings distribution we estimate fixed effects and quantile regressions to control for unobserved individual characteristics our results suggest that the informal sector earnings gap highly depends on the workers job status and on their relative position in the earnings distribution penalties may in some cases turn into premiums by comparing our results with studies in other developing countries we draw conclusions highlighting vietnam s labour market specificity

testing for the absence of expected real profits from forward market speculation abstract this paper tests for the absence of expected real profits from forward market speculation it contrasts with the literature that has considered opportunities for expected nominal profit from speculation that is profits denominated in one of the currencies these studies assume money illusion on the part of market participants but this paper does not empirical results fail to find evidence of unexploited real profit opportunities

payment schemes and gender in germany the authors estimate the determinants of five types of variable payment schemes using panel data on german establishments in 1994 and 1996 women were disproportionately included in schemes based on individual productivity and on profit sharing but not in those based on work group productivity this pattern seems inconsistent with the claim that women are sorted due to their shorter expected tenure instead the authors argue the critical issue may be that women have a greater need for flexibility between work and home than men do collective bargaining coverage and other industrial relations variables are shown to be influential determinants interacting with gender

peer pressure and partnerships partnerships and profit sharing are often claimed to motivate workers by giving them a share of the pie but in organizations of any significant size the free rider effects would seem to choke off

absenteeism as a mechanism for approaching an optimal labor market equilibrium an empirical study this research examines absence as a response to a non optimal labor market equilibrium its basic premise is that workers may be using absenteeism to move themselves closer to an optimal equilibrium in situations where due to greater than desiredwork hours the workers marginal rate of substitution of income for leisure mrs is less than the wage rate for the last hour worked this notion is tested for a sample of workers using tobit analysis with individual data from company records on absence and wages and an empirical measure of each worker s mrs the results indicate a significant positive relationship between absence and the difference between a worker s mrs and wage

releasing constraints to growth or pushing on a string policies and performance of mexican micro firms abstract using firm level data from mexico this paper investigates the firm characteristics associated with participation in credit markets access to training tax payments and membership in business associations we find that firms which participate in these institutions exhibit significantly higher profits moreover firms that borrow from formal or informal sources and those that pay taxes are significantly more likely to stay in business but firms that received credit exhibit lower rates of income growth these results persist when firm characteristics that are arguably correlated with unobserved entrepreneurial ability are controlled for our findings suggest that the significant within country differences in firm productivity observed in developing economies are due in part to market and government failures that limit the ability of micro firms to reach their optimal sizes

household entrepreneurship and social networks panel data evidence from vietnam en utilisant un panel de microentreprises familiales au vietnam cet article met en relation le reseau social des entrepreneurs et de leur menage avec la performance de la microentreprise familiale nous abordons deux questions connexes la premiere examine la possibilite d effets differencies de l emploi des membres de la famille par rapport a des travailleurs recrutes sur le marche du travail sur la performance de la microentreprise une deuxieme question aborde les effets respectifs des differentes dimensions des reseaux sociaux sur l efficience technique de la microentreprise l hypothese testee est que au dela du canal de la productivite du travail les entrepreneurs qui sont confrontes a un environnement social defavorable pourraient produire moins efficacement et realiser une valeur ajoutee plus faible que ce qui pourrait etre possible avec la meme quantite de ressources nous montrons qu il existe en effet un differentiel de productivite entre le travail familial et le travail recrute sur le marche et nos resultats attestent de la presence d effets defavorables du reseau social pour certains menages gerant une microentreprise nous soulignons aussi l importance des reseaux professionnels pour la reussite de l entreprenariat familial

absenteeism and wages abstract we show that for assembly line type production processes a worker s wage is a sharply decreasing function of his probability of being absent absenteeism causes firms to hire redundant workers we also define the marginal product of assembly line workers

does high involvement management improve worker wellbeing employees exposed to high involvement management him practices have higher subjective wellbeing fewer accidents but more short absence spells than like employees not exposed to him these results are robust to extensive work wage and sickness absence history controls we highlight the possibility of higher short term absence in the presence of him because it is more demanding than standard production and because multi skilled him workers cover for one another s short absences thus reducing the cost of replacement labour faced by the employer we find direct empirical support for this in accordance with the theoretical framework we find also that long term absences are independent of exposure to him which is consistent with long term absences entailing replacement labour costs and with short absences having a negative effect on longer absences

absenteeism efficiency wages and shirking we investigate the absence behaviour of workers when there is asymmetric information regarding worker health an individual s health is assumed to be private information to that individual and only observable to a third party at cost our aim is to complement the existing largely empirical studies of absence behaviour which have tended to treat the phenomenon exclusively as a labour supply decision on the part of workers cf allen 1981 barmby and treble 1991 barmby orme and treble 1991 and dunn and youngblood 1986 our approach is to draw out the interactive aspects of the employment relationship we assume that workers are ex ante uncertain as to their state of health and supply labour on the basis of an all or nothing utility maximising decision taken once a realisation of this state has been received utility is a function of income leisure and health and workers value leisure more the sicker they are firms are able to exert some control over individual behaviour by monitoring workers and threatening to fire shirkers that is workers absenting themselves with unacceptable sickness our model highlights an efficiency wage effect through which wages may be used as a method of absence control in particular the optimal response of the firm to an increase in the cost of monitoring is to discourage shirking by raising wages furthermore to the extent that

the benefits of formalization evidence from vietnamese manufacturing smes summary based on unique panel data consisting of both formal and informal firms this paper uses a matched double difference approach to examine the relationship between legal status and firm level outcomes in micro small and medium manufacturing enterprises smes in vietnam controlling for determining factors and observable time variant factors that may simultaneously influence the decision to formalize and subsequent firm performance we find evidence that becoming officially registered leads to an increase in profits and investments and a decrease in the use of casual labor improved contract conditions for workers thus we conclude that formalizing is beneficial both to firms and the workers in these firms

the effects of real exchange rate risk on international trade abstract by assuming real profit maximization and uncertain prices as well as exchange rates we conclude that it is uncertain percentage changes in the real exchange rate that are risky in international trade empirical estimation of fourteen bilateral trade flows among industrialized countries finds a significant negative effect on trade quantity from such risk in a number of these cases the expectation variable has a positive effect in a larger number of cases significant price effects from the expectation variable are fewer and from risk are negligible

pay technology and the cost of worker absence i introduction the complexity of patterns of worker absence is well known but is yielding reluctantly to studies that use highly detailed information about individual workers and their work environments to date these studies have focussed on how specific contractual details affect worker absenteeism rates 1 in this paper we instead take an equilibrium perspective where we assume heterogeneous firms and heterogeneous workers participate in a competitive labor market by understanding why firms with different technologies may have different policies toward absenteeism we can begin to explain observed differences in absenteeism rates across workers and firms the empirical framework is based on coles and treble 1996 which considers an equilibrium assignment model with heterogeneous firms and workers the standard assignment framework 2 assumes that each filled job is characterized by one machine of quality q and one employee with skill level s a competitive equilibrium yields a wage schedule w and an assignment rule q where a worker of skill s is hired at wage w w s by a firm holding machine q q s coles and treble 1996 do not assume that workers are differently skilled instead workers have different propensities to go absent also instead of a one worker one machine production process firms utilize different production technologies some use an assembly line technology where output requires that a sufficient number of workers show up for work and others use a linear production technology in which there are constant marginal returns to labor for reasons that will become clear a competitive equilibrium yields a wage schedule and an assignment rule that depend on worker propensities to go absent specifically workers with a lower propensity to go absent earn a higher wage and are employed in firms using assembly line technologies the key insight is that firms who operate assembly line technologies have a different shadow cost of absenteeism from those which operate a linear technology as in weiss 1985 and coles and treble 1993 in the latter technology an absence by one particular worker does not affect the marginal productivity of other workers at the firm this is not true in an assembly line firm or in production functions where labor inputs are strict complements as in kremer 1993 coles and treble 1996 consider a market equilibrium in which workers are also heterogeneous say workers have different family responsibilities in this case a competitive labor market implies equilibrium sorting by firms and workers assembly line firms require a low level of absenteeism and pay a relatively high wage to compensate workers for attending work reliably we refer to this as the shadow cost of absenteeism workers who have a comparative advantage in attending work reliably say those who do not have to look after children when the children are sick take employment in assembly line firms and enjoy the wage premium attached to employment there we refer to this as the shadow price of absenteeism conversely those who appreciate greater flexibility in work attendance take employment in the linear technology firms and in equilibrium earn a lower average wage rate although absenteeism may be costly to firms observed absenteeism rates are not necessarily inefficient the worker who misses a day at work to look after sick children or enjoy a sports event is expressing a trade off between workplace production and home production where home productivity is perhaps subject to idiosyncratic shocks efficient contracting implies that firms and workers agree to an acceptable absenteeism rate and a compensating wage differential efficient sorting implies that those workers who can commit to attending work reliably accept employment in assembly line occupations and so earn a wage premium reflecting the shadow price of absenteeism our goal is to identify and measure this shadow price using a unique data set from france

mobility in the urban labor market a panel data analysis for mexico abstract we analyze mobility in urban mexico between three labor market states working in the formal sector working in the informal sector and not working a dynamic multinomial logit panel data model with random effects is used explaining the labor market state of each individual during each time period the data are drawn from mexico s urban employment survey a quarterly household survey for urban mexico while some of the descriptive statistics suggest that informal sector jobs are inferior to formal sector jobs formal tests cannot reject the null hypothesis of equal transition rates between formal and informal sector jobs for homogeneous groups of workers looking at entry and exit into and out of nonemployment we find that transitions from formal sector jobs to nonemployment were less likely than transitions from informal sector jobs to nonemployment in 1992 but not in 1999 suggesting that employment protection in the formal sector has been reduced

corporate downsizing to rebuild team spirit how costly voting can foster cooperation we propose a new mechanism to achieve coordination through voting for which we discuss a number of real life applications among them the mechanism provides for a new theory for downsizing in organizations a crisis may lead to a decrease in the willingness to cooperate in an organization and therefore to a bad equilibrium a consensual downsizing episode may signal credibly that survivors are willing to cooperate and thus it may be optimal and efficiency enhancing for the individuals remaining in the organization as the empirical evidence suggests a variation of the same mechanism leads to efficient upsizing jel c70 d70 m50

absenteeism predictors least squares rank regression and model selection results this paper examines the determinants of absenteeism using ols rank based re gressions and a model selection procedure the results show that personal attributes are the most important determinants of long term absences for total working days lost the penalty factors are the most significant predictors the results also show that absenteeism tends to be lower among firms with more part time workers unionization on the other hand increases the total days lost due to absenteeism

explaining forecasting bias the case of real exchange rate variance recent tests of the rational expections hypothesis reh based on the assumption that agents are risk neutral have yielded conflicting results when applied to foreign exchange markets here a two stage procedure which does not assumej risk neutrality is derived from a model of a utility maximizing importer who incurs an adjustment cost if he changes his import order although a short run test based on aggregate imports leads to rejection of the reh in the majortity of cases a longer ren test based on manchinery imports is more favourable to the null huypthesis the observed shot run tendency to in effect ignore low levels of real exchange rate variation is found to be more likely when bilateral rates have remained relatively stable when the importingj economy is relatively closed or when governments have announced policies of intervention to stabilize bilateral rates

price expectations in the united states 1947 75 it is common to assume that expectations about future inflation influence economic behavior the behavior of an economic system over time is determined in part by the manner in which these expectations are formed theoretical and empirical investigations frequently utilize a hypothesis that agents forecast future inflation rates primarily on the basis of past inflation rates static adaptive extrapolative and regressive expectations adjustment schemes are examples of such forecasting rules 1 but such rules generally ignore the fact that individuals observe prices not inflation rates a change in observed prices can result from general price inflation but it may also result from transitory shocks to the price level or observation error similarly apparent changes in the general inflation rate may be purely transitory in nature or may signify the beginning of a trend a model of inflation expectations should admit the possibility of these different sources of price change and embody the natural human tendency to extrapolate seeming trends this paper examines the extent to which agents reported price expectations are consistent with such naive forecasting a multilevel adaptive expectations model is developed that takes observed prices as the information available to agents on the basis of these prices individuals revise their beliefs about not only the price level but also the underlying inflation rate and trend in the inflation rate when fitted to the livingston survey data the model appears to provide a unified explanation of price expectations in the united states from 1947 to 1975 this is contrasted with earlier investigations suggesting that expectations formation differed significantly in the periods before and after 1960

do the vietnamese support the economic doi moi abstract each reform implies social and economic changes after experiencing war and reunification today vietnam is implementing a comprehensive and deep process of renovation doi moi but a revolution needs the support of the population to be successful this article investigates whether the vietnamese are supportive of some of the main features of a market economy in particular the preferences for competition ownership of firms either private or public and income inequality as an incentive to productivity are studied here the data allow us to conclude that the doi moi is not at risk but the population tend to contrast income inequality

public private sector wage gap by gender in egypt evidence from quantile regression on panel data 1998 2018 abstract this paper estimates the public formal private wage gap in egypt using egypt labor market panel survey for the 20 year period of 1998 2018 for men and women separately we estimate the public formal private sector wage gap with wage equations including a public sector indicator both at the mean and at different quantiles of the conditional wage distribution using the panel feature of the data we also address the endogenous employment and the sector of employment selection issue and find a persistent public wage penalty for the males and public wage premium for the females except at the top even after controlling for the observable and the time invariant unobservable characteristics we further examine the public wage gap over time and in different sub samples by potential experience skill levels and regions generally the results are consistent with a decrease in the public wage gap for both men and women over the period considered we further provide evidence on the quality of workers we find that the public sector fails to attract better quality men throughout the conditional wage distribution while it manages to attract better quality women in the lower parts of the conditional wage distribution but not at the top all on the basis of time invariant unobservable attributes these results indicate concern for the efficient provision of public services

social preferences and strategic uncertainty an experiment on markets and contracts this paper reports experimental evidence on a stylized labor market the experiment is designed as a sequence of three phases in the first two phases p1 and p2 agents face simple games which we use to estimate subjects social and reciprocity concerns together with their beliefs in the last phase p3 four principals who face four teams of two agents compete by offering agents a contract from a fixed menu then each agent selects one of the available contracts i e he chooses to work for a principal production is determined by the outcome of a simple effort game induced by the chosen contract we find that heterogeneous social preferences are significant determinants of choices in all phases of the experiment since the available contracts display a trade off between fairness and strategic uncertainty we observe that the latter is a much stronger determinant of choices for both principals and agents finally we also see that social preferences explain to a large extent matching between principals and agents since agents display a marked propensity to work for principals with similar social preferences

global value chains large scale farming and poverty long term effects in senegal this paper presents panel data evidence on the impact of expansion of global value chains and large scale export oriented farms in developing countries over almost a decade we estimate the income effects of wage employment on large scale farms in the horticultural export sector in senegal using data from two survey rounds covering a seven years period of rapid expansion of the sector we estimate average income effects as well as heterogeneous income effects using fixed effects and quantile fixed effects regressions we find that poverty and inequality reduced much faster in the research area than elsewhere in senegal employment in the horticultural export sector is associated with higher household income and the income effect is strongest for the poorest households expansion of the horticultural export sector in senegal has been particularly pro poor through creating employment that is accessible and creates substantial income gains for the poorest half of the rural population these pro poor employment effects contrast with insights in the literature on increased inequality from rural wage employment

teams teamwork and absence we argue that firms with interdependent worker productivity team production have a higher cost of absence and as a consequence spend additional resources on monitoring absence as a result firms with team production should have lower absence rates we estimate the determinants of absence for blue collar workers using a sample of german manufacturing establishments workplace teams are used as a proxy for team production the estimates reveal that firms with teams have lower absence rates as do smaller establishments the size effect however is unique to establishments with teams which fits prior theoretical work that has not been previously tested

the changing role of non farm household enterprises in vietnam summary in this paper we study the importance of the non farm household enterprise nfhe sector in vietnam we do find that nfhes increase income and reduce between household inequality however the role of the nfhe sector has been diminishing especially in urban areas and the nfhes have been affected by trade liberalization in the period 1993 2002 in terms of policy this suggests that there is increasing scope for targeting nfhe sector policies at those nfhes that are in the best position to benefit from the new opportunities in the liberalizing environment

looking after number two competition cooperation and workplace interaction abstract we look for cooperation in a real world setting in which optometrists absent less frequently in two chair than one chair offices because of the externality such behavior imposes on their co worker we motivate our empirical analysis by developing a model of worker interdependence in which two workers can either compete or cooperate we show that relative to a single worker working in isolation competition unequivocally increases absence whilst cooperation may increase or decrease absence our empirical analysis of a unique data set finds explicit support for cooperative behavior

employment vulnerability and earnings in urban west africa this article develops indicators of vulnerability in employment in seven economic capitals of west africa and studies their links with individual incomes quantitative distributional and qualitative analyses show that vulnerability compensating mechanism is mainly seen in the informal sector in the upper tail of the earnings distribution and particularly in the circumstance of visible underemployment employment vulnerability is not compensated for the poorest workers in the private sector long job queues and weak institutional protection of workers may have reduced bargaining power in the formal sector

unobserved heterogeneity and the relation between earnings and firm size evidence from two developing countries abstract large firms in ghana and kenya pay much higher wages than small ones we use panel data to show this is not the result of employing high ability individuals the size effect remains substantial with controls for individual fixed effects

information and the division of labour implications for the firm s choice of organisation this paper provides a partial analysis of the organizational problem that arises from decentralized information within the firm firm members possessing different decision relevant information can communicate in different ways leading to a taxonomy of organizational structures with different effectiveness and costs it is shown that with usual assumptions about the form of the payoff function and the stochastic nature of information the decision functions and the expected profit for different organizations have a simple linear form comprising a small number of information value parameters copyright 1995 by royal economic society