bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Performance Pay and Earnings: Evidence from Personnel Records
Authors: Pekkarinen Tuomas , Riddell Chris
Published: June 2015

This paper examines the earnings effects of performance pay using linked employee-employer panel data from Finland's metal industry for 1990–2000. The authors estimate the effects of performance pay contracts in the presence of individual and firm unobserved heterogeneity as well as in tasks of different complexity. Unobservable firm characteristics explain about 40% of the variance in the use of performance pay. Performance pay workers earned substantially more than fixed rate workers, a finding that persists even in analyses that use for identification only those workers who changed firms (and contracts) due to an establishment closure. There is also evidence of a strong, negative relationship between job complexity and the incentive effects of performance pay. Finally, several “quasi-experiments” show that when one plant underwent a compensation regime change but other highly similar plants in the same firm did not, workers in the “treatment” plant gained substantial earnings premiums.
How Immigrants Fare across the Earnings Distribution in Australia and the United States
Authors: Chiswick Barry R. , Le Anh T. , Miller Paul W.
Published: June 2015

This paper investigates determinants of the earnings distribution for native-born workers and immigrant workers in two countries. The authors, using data from the 2000 U.S. Census and 2001 Australian Census, employ a methodology (quantile regression) that facilitates measurement of the native-born/immigrant earnings differential and the partial effect of explanatory variables such as schooling and experience at each decile of the earnings distribution. They find evidence that schooling and labor market experience had stronger earnings effects at higher deciles. The native/immigrant earnings gap varied by decile, and in particular increased in the United States at higher deciles. The results suggest that in the United States minimum wages compressed earnings at low deciles, whereas in Australia the minimum (administered) wage system compressed earnings across the entire distribution. A pattern of higher earnings for immigrants than for the native-born at the lowest earnings decile in Australia may reflect favorable selectivity in migration.
The Returns to Pencil Use Revisited
Authors: Spitz-Oener Alexandra
Published: June 2015

Many researchers believe that the observed positive association between computer use and wages simply reflects unobserved heterogeneity: like pencils and other “white-collar” tools, computers are assigned to employees who possess productive attributes that would attract higher wages in any event. This study evaluates that claim by identifying the mechanisms through which computers changed the wage structure in West Germany in the late 1990s. The author finds that the spread of computers—but not of pencils—shifted the task composition of occupations toward analytical and interactive tasks that are complementary to computers' capabilities, and away from routine cognitive and manual tasks for which computers tend to substitute. Employees possessing computer-complementary skills enjoyed wage increases because computers both raised the demand for their skills and increased their marginal product.
Institutional Environments, Work and Human Resource Practices, and Unions: Canada versus England
Authors: Godard John
Published: June 2015

This analysis of data from a 2003–2004 telephone survey of 750 Canadian and 450 English workers finds that work practices and human resource (HR) practices had important implications for unions. The effects differed by the type of practice (for example, traditional versus “new” HR), and were mediated by each country's institutional environment. For example, traditional personnel/HR practices were strongly positively related to the likelihood of union representation and strongly negatively related to workers' propensity to vote for a union in Canada, but made little difference to either of those union outcomes in England; and “alternative” work practices bore an inverse U-shaped association with union representation in Canada, versus a positive relationship with that outcome in England. In general, the Canadian findings are consistent with an adversarial dynamic, and the English findings with a more collaborative one.
Do Peripheral Workers Do Peripheral Work? Comparing the Use of Highly Skilled Contractors and Regular Employees
Authors: Bidwell Matthew
Published: June 2015

This paper uses data from a 2002 survey of project managers in a large, U.S.-based financial services institution to compare how contractors and regular employees were assigned to work within an information technology department. The author uses these data to test standard core-periphery arguments about the use of contingent workers, as well as accounts of contingent work that emphasize the interests of frontline managers. He finds that contractors and employees were used very similarly in most respects, although there were some differences. Contractors were less likely to be used in roles that were more critical to the firm, but more likely to be used when frontline managers' interests could conflict with the organization's. Contractors were also less likely to be given positions requiring knowledge of the business. No evidence is found, however, that other kinds of firm-specific skills affected how contractors were used.
Has Japan's Long-Term Employment Practice Survived? Developments since the 1990S
Authors: Shimizutani Satoshi , Yokoyama Izumi
Published: June 2015

Japan's traditional long-term employment practice, loosely termed “lifetime employment,” once attracted much attention, but its fortunes have not been tracked since the 1990s. The authors use micro data from the Japanese government's Basic Survey on Wage Structure to estimate permanent full-time workers' tenure patterns in the years during and following Japan's decade-long recession. Mean tenure, they find, grew for both genders between 1990 and 2003. The main explanation for this trend was a changing relationship between tenure and the attributes of workers and firms, rather than changes in the attributes themselves—although the importance of the latter increased for some women. Beyond the tendency at the mean, the authors find substantial variation. Notably, workers who had gained employment protection under the traditional system, mostly in large firms, saw larger gains in mean tenure than did other workers. This divergence, the authors suggest, could eventually exacerbate lifetime income inequality in Japan.
Does Membership Payoff for Covered Workers? A Distributional Analysis of the Free Rider Problem
Authors: Eren Ozkan
Published: June 2015

This paper examines the union membership wage premium among private sector employees covered by collective bargaining agreements. Using Current Population Survey data for 2000–2003, the author not only estimates the conditional mean wage premium—the metric on which most previous research has focused—but also employs recently developed (instrumental) quantile regression techniques to estimate the wage effect of membership across the wage distribution. Members enjoyed, on average, a wage premium of 9% over comparable covered nonmembers. Further analyses find no evidence that this mean premium is explained either by unobserved differences or by measurement error. The author also finds that a narrow focus on the mean impact partially masks heterogeneity in the impact across the distribution. Notably, membership wage effects were considerably more pronounced for low wage earners than for high wage earners.
Short Trips and Long Days: Safety and Health in Short-Haul Trucking
Authors: Williamson Ann , Bohle Philip , Quinlan Michael , Kennedy David
Published: June 2015

This paper looks at the role and influence of contingent employment among short-haul truckers, an occupational group that has been little studied to date. A 2003 survey of Australian short-haul drivers examined the predictors of health and safety outcomes for all drivers and provided comparative information on the working hours, occupational safety and health, and work-life conflict of permanent employees, temporary (casual) employees, and owner-drivers. The main predictor of both illness and injury for all drivers was work-life conflict. The results show that contingent work is characteristic of short-haul trucking in Australia, especially among owner-drivers and casual employees. Contingent-work drivers differ from other drivers on a range of organizational characteristics, but not on safety and health outcomes. Contingent employment can take different forms, each of which is associated with a somewhat different set of effects on workers.
Work Design Variation and Outcomes in Call Centers: Strategic Choice and Institutional Explanations
Authors: Holman David , Frenkel Stephen , Sørensen Ole , Wood Stephen
Published: June 2015

This study examines reasons for variation in work design (defined by job discretion and performance monitoring) and how work design affects organizational outcomes. Drawing on a 2003–2006 survey of 2,359 call centers in 16 countries, the authors test strategic human resource management theory's implication that firms' strategic and operational contexts influence work design variation within countries, and “varieties of capitalism” theory's implication that national institutional frameworks influence cross-country differences in work design. Results of a multi-level analysis indicate that job discretion was higher and performance monitoring less frequent when management strategy targeted business customers rather than mass market customers; when there was an emphasis on building customer relationships; and when the setting was a coordinated economy. Regarding organizational outcomes, job discretion was negatively associated with quit rates and labor costs, while monitoring was negatively associated with call abandonment rates and positively associated with quit rates and sales growth.
Temporary Work in Coordinated Market Economies: Evidence from Front-Line Service Workplaces
Authors: Shire Karen A. , Mottweiler Hannelore , Schönauer Annika , Valverde Mireia
Published: June 2015

The growing use of temporary contracts in Europe raises the question of whether long-term employment relations are eroding in coordinated market economies, where protective regulations are historically strong. This paper, using data from establishment-level surveys conducted in 2003–2005, examines the institutional and organizational factors that have shaped the extent of use of temporary contracts in call centers in six European countries: Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain, and Sweden. While differences in regulatory regimes appear to have influenced employer behavior in some cases, the exceptions are striking, as the countries with the most stringent restrictions on temporary workers were among the heaviest users of such workers. By contrast, firm-level strategies that retained work in-house and invested in work force skills and training were consistent predictors of the use of long-term contracts as opposed to temporary ones.
Joint Responsibility Unionism: A Multi-Plant Model of Collective Bargaining under Employment Security
Authors: Block Richard N. , Berg Peter
Published: June 2015

The authors develop a general model of local-level bargaining in the multi-plant firm. According to this model, when the parent firm has the ability to allocate production differentially across plants, the local union may be motivated to work with local management to reduce production costs and increase profitability, in order to increase plant employment or minimize reductions in plant employment. A case study using data from General Motors' Lansing Grand River Assembly (LGRA) and United Auto Workers Local 652, collected in part from interviews conducted in 2003–2008, shows how the parties established a joint responsibility system of collective bargaining that encouraged the union to reduce production costs and increase profitability by accepting responsibilities traditionally borne by management. The authors also demonstrate that General Motors, consistent with budget, capacity, and political constraints, invested in LGRA and assigned new product to LGRA, thus supporting the hypothesized incentive structure.
Unions and the Adoption of High Performance Work Systems: Does Employment Security Play a Role?
Authors: Liu Wenchuan , Guthrie James P. , Flood Patrick C. , Maccurtain Sarah
Published: June 2015

Previous research on the association between unionization and the adoption of high performance work systems (HPWSs) has yielded inconsistent results. Using data from a 2004 multi-industry survey of firms operating in the Republic of Ireland, the authors examine the relationship between employee union membership rates and relative use of HPWSs. They also test arguments that employment security may affect the receptiveness of unions to such HR practices. The results indicate that as union representation increased, there was a significant decrease in the use of high performance work systems. Evidence also suggests that providing employment security significantly ameliorated this negative impact.
German Works Councils and the Anatomy of Wages
Authors: Addison John T. , Teixeira Paulino , Zwick Thomas
Published: June 2015

Using matched employer-employee data from the German LIAB for 2001, the authors found that German works councils are in general associated with higher earnings, even after accounting for establishment- and worker heterogeneity. Works council wage premia exceed those of collective bargaining and are higher, in fact, where both institutions are present in the workplace. The authors also found evidence indicating that works councils benefit women relative to men and appear to favor foreign, east-German, and service-sector workers as well. Separate evidence from quantile regressions suggests that the conjunction of works council presence and collective bargaining is important to the narrowing process. In smaller plants even the presence of a works council markup depends on the coexistence of the works council entity with the machinery of collective bargaining.
Workers' Compensation: Recent Developments in Moral Hazard and Benefit Payments
Authors: Guo Xuguang (Steve) , Burton John F.
Published: June 2015

Studies using pre-1990 data generally found benefit and frequency elasticities for workers' compensation cash benefits that exceeded, respectively, 1.0 and 0: an increase in expected benefits apparently induced (a) an even greater increase in actual benefit payments and (b) an increase in claim frequency. Researchers previously hypothesized that incentive effects for workers dominated those for employers. The authors of this study reevaluate benefit and frequency elasticities for 1975–89, using data with some advantages over those used by previous studies, and also investigate whether the elasticities changed during the years 1990–1999, when insurance policies with large deductibles increased employers' incentives to limit benefits and many states restricted benefit eligibility. For both periods, they find benefit elasticities significantly under 1.0 and frequency elasticities of about 0. They also find that much of the substantial decline in actual benefits in the 1990s was due to changes in state compensability rules and administrative stringency.
Did Lower Unionization in the United States Result in More Flexible Industries?
Authors: Magnani Elisabetta , Prentice David
Published: June 2015

Do unions really impede manufacturers' output flexibility? If so, in what ways? The authors propose a methodology for quantifying George Stigler's concept of output flexibility, and for decomposing the effects of unionization on average cost differences between union and non-union plants. Using a recently compiled data set on U.S. three-digit manufacturing industries from 1973 to 1996, they adapt this methodology to simulate the effects of unionization on flexibility and average costs for average-size plants. Simulation results indicate that higher unionization was associated with higher average costs and lower flexibility than low unionization. Higher average costs appear to have been primarily due to higher fixed costs, such as higher benefits.
Enforcement and Compliance with Labor Regulations in Argentina
Authors: Ronconi Lucas
Published: June 2015

The author analyzes the effect of government enforcement on compliance with labor regulations in Argentina, a country where only half of the workforce receives all the benefits to which they are legally entitled. Constructing panel data for the period 1995–2002 across provinces and using the number of labor inspectors per capita as a proxy for enforcement, he estimates the effect of enforcement on compliance with six employment and social security regulations: minimum wage, maximum hours, paid vacation time, annual extra monthly wage, workers compensation insurance, and health insurance. Because of potential simultaneity between enforcement and compliance, the author explores instrumenting enforcement by electoral years. Two-stage least squares estimates suggest enforcement increases compliance.
Employee Stock Ownership, Involvement, and Productivity: An Interaction-Based Approach
Authors: Pendleton Andrew , Robinson Andrew
Published: June 2015

The authors use the British Workplace Employment Relations Survey to assess whether the combination of employee stock ownership (ESO) plans and participation in decision-making positively affect productivity or whether ESO alone affects employee productivity. By assessing the extent to which employees participate in ESOs and the quality of their decision-making, the authors provide a clearer and more nuanced picture of this relationship with productivity. On the one hand, results show that stock plans seem to need other forms of employee involvement and “voice” in the firm to be effective, especially when there is minority participation in the ESO plan. On the other hand, results indicate that majority participation in the plan has an independent effect on productivity. Overall, the authors' research challenges prevailing views about the complementarity of stock ownership and employee involvement practices.
The Timing of Maternal Work and Time with Children
Authors: Stewart Jay
Published: June 2015

The author investigates how maternal employment affects when during the day that employed mothers engage in enriching childcare and whether they adjust their work schedules to spend time with their children at more-desirable times of day. Using data from the American Time Use Survey and focusing on mothers of pre-school-aged children, he finds that both full- and part-time employed mothers shift enriching childcare time from workdays to non-workdays. On workdays, full-time employed mothers shift enriching care time to evenings, whereas part-time employed mothers shift care time very little. The author finds no evidence that mothers working full time adjust their work schedules to spend enriching time with their children at more preferred times of day. In contrast, part-time employed mothers shift their work hours to later in the day in order to spend time with their children at more-desirable times of day.
The Impact of Teams on Output, Quality, and Downtime: An Empirical Analysis Using Individual Panel Data
Authors: Jones Derek C. , Kato Takao
Published: June 2015

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 and non-team-member operators. They hypothesize that team membership without complementary involvement practices is initially sufficient to enhance productivity and quality control. Further, the use of teams leads initially to more downtime, but this cost will diminish over time. Findings indicate that membership in offline teams initially increases individual productivity by about 3% and lowers rejection rates by about 27%. These improvements dissipate, however, typically at a rate of 10 to 16% per 100 days in a team. For these benefits to be sustained, team membership must be complemented with measures that provide extrinsic rewards. The authors also find that the performance-enhancing effects of team membership are generally greater and longer-lasting for more educated members.
Discovering One's Talent: Learning from Academic Specialization
Authors: Malamud Ofer
Published: June 2015

The author examines an exogenous difference in the timing of academic specialization within the British system of higher education to test whether education yields information about one's match quality in different fields of study. In distinguishing between systems requiring early and late specialization, he predicts the likelihood of an individual switching to an occupation unrelated to one's field of study. If higher education serves mainly to provide specific skills, the model predicts more switching in a system requiring late specialization since the cost of switching is lower in terms of foregone skills. Using the Universities Statistical Record from 1972 to 1993 and the 1980 National Survey of Graduates and Diplomates, he finds that individuals who specialize early, as in the case of England, are more likely to switch to an unrelated occupation, implying that the benefits to increased match quality are sufficiently large to outweigh the greater loss in skills from specializing early.
Teacher Attitudes about Compensation Reform: Implications for Reform Implementation
Authors: Goldhaber Dan , Dearmond Michael , Deburgomaster Scott
Published: June 2015

Concerns about the quality of the teacher workforce and the distribution of teacher quality among schools have led to calls to reform teacher compensation. The authors present the results of the 2006 Washington State Teacher Compensation survey on teachers' attitudes about this issue. By linking survey results to detailed data on school and district characteristics, they analyze how teacher attitudes differ by individual characteristics such as subject area, school assignment, or experience, as well as workplace characteristics such as school performance and the level of trust among teachers and principals. The results suggest teachers' attitudes toward reform are shaped by self-interest as well as by professional norms of collegiality—two factors that can push teachers' attitudes toward compensation reform in opposite directions. For example, teachers with middle and high school assignments in mathematics and science are more supportive of subject-area bonuses; the more trust that exists among teachers, however, the less teachers support merit pay.
Returning to Work from Injury: Longitudinal Evidence on Employment and Earnings
Authors: Crichton Sarah , Stillman Steven , Hyslop Dean
Published: June 2015

New Zealand has a unique accident insurance system that pays the direct costs of all injuries and compensates workers up to 80% of their earnings for any time that they are unable to work. To estimate the effect of injuries on labor market outcomes, the authors use Statistics New Zealand's Linked Employer-Employee Database (LEED) covering the period April 1999 to March 2004 using a difference-in-differences matching approach. They use two alternative matching criteria to construct control groups of non-injured workers whose pre-injury characteristics are similar to those of injured workers: the first uses only characteristics of the workers whereas the second exploits the nature of the LEED and matches workers in the same firm. Findings indicate that injuries resulting in more than three months of earnings compensation have negative effects on future labor market outcomes that do not decline with time post-injury. The results are broadly similar using both matching criteria, providing more validity to the authors' findings.
On (And Off) the Hot Seat: An Analysis of Entry into and Out of University Administration
Authors: McDowell John M. , Singell Larry D. , Stater Mark
Published: June 2015

The authors investigate economists' decisions to enter and exit department chair positions in research-intensive economics departments of elite universities during the postwar era (1948–1989). They use the American Economic Association Survey of Members as well as phone surveys to determine which, and at what point in their careers, faculty assume administrative positions. The theoretical model predicts and empirical results confirm that a faster rate of knowledge depreciation in an economist's field of study reduces the entry and exit rates for the chair position. Moreover, among those who have exited the position of chair, longer terms of past chair service and faster knowledge depreciation accelerate the timing of movements into upper-level administration. The findings suggest that administrators are to some extent made and not born, and that the growing specialization and technical nature of many professions could affect who chooses administrative careers and at what point in their careers they choose them.
In Search of the Glass Ceiling: Gender and Earnings Growth among U.S. College Graduates in the 1990S
Authors: Weinberger Catherine J.
Published: June 2015

Gender-typical educational choices and the “glass ceiling” are widely believed to explain why older women earn far less than observably similar men. Using large panels drawn from the National Science Foundation's (NSF) National Survey of College Graduates and other data representative of U.S. college graduates from the 1990s, the author documents the small role of personal choices and finds evidence contrary to the predictions of both human capital and discrimination models. Rather than the differential wage growth rates predicted by these models, she finds similar average rates of earnings growth for women and men across numerous specifications, which suggests that the gender gap in earnings is determined by factors already present early in the career. Her findings reveal slower earnings growth in only two subsets of women: young mothers, who experience slower earnings growth during the early career relative to men the same age, but then compensate with faster growth later in their careers; and women with exceptionally high earnings levels. The latter are underrepresented among workers winning the largest promotions, when compared to similarly successful men the same age, and face a glass ceiling at the very top of the career ladder.
Organizational and Individual Learning and Forgetting
Authors: Kleiner Morris M. , Nickelsburg Jerry , Pilarski Adam M.
Published: June 2015

Researchers of industrial relations issues in manufacturing have long recognized that careful study of production has significant implications for labor productivity. Recent theory and analysis has shown the large influence of organizational forgetting. The authors of this study demonstrate that forgetting by workers in an establishment or line of production as a substantive characteristic of actual production processes is overstated and that alternative, simpler theoretical and empirical explanations have at least as good explanatory power. Using inside-the-firm analysis, they find that the omitted-variable bias in other studies due to data limitations has the potential for spurious estimates of large forgetting rates by lines of work. Further, they find that forgetting, although important and interesting, is not as influential as previous work for labor productivity has suggested. Further analysis of the production function and the role of organizational forgetting needs to be fully specified in a model to include internal production and labor relations characteristics, like those in this study, to be a plausible model of the production process within manufacturing establishments.
Pathology of Path Dependency? The ILO and the Challenge of New Governance
Authors: Baccaro Lucio , Mele Valentina
Published: June 2015

Using archival sources, the authors study strategic and organizational change in the International Labour Organization (ILO) over the last twenty years. They focus specifically on the ILO's efforts to incorporate certain elements of the “new governance” model into its policies and organizational practices, which include the shift from standards expressed as detailed legal norms to “soft law”; the active involvement of civil society organizations other than trade unions and employer associations in regulatory activities; and the introduction of quantitative indicators of compliance with labor standards. They argue that the efforts of the ILO leadership have been waylaid by the organization's corporatist structure, which gives employer associations and trade unions veto power over policy developments at a time in which these actors are increasingly unable to agree on concrete policy measures. Finally, the authors ask whether this corporatist structure accurately reflects the ILO's self-defined mission: providing “decent work for all.”
Are the Effects of Minimum Wage Increases Always Small? New Evidence from a Case Study of New York State
Authors: Sabia Joseph J. , Burkhauser Richard V. , Hansen Benjamin
Published: June 2015

The authors estimate the effect of the 2004–6 New York State (NYS) minimum wage increase from $5.15 to $6.75 per hour on the employment rates of 16- to 29-year-olds who do not have a high school diploma. Using data drawn from the 2004 and 2006 Current Population Survey, they employ difference-in-difference estimates to show that the NYS minimum wage increase is associated with a 20.2% to 21.8% reduction in the employment of less-skilled, less-educated workers, with the largest effects on those aged 16 to 24. Their estimates imply a median employment elasticity with respect to the minimum wage of around −0.7, large relative to previous researchers' estimates. The authors' findings are robust to their choice of geographically proximate comparison states, the use of a more highly skilled within-state comparison group, and a synthetic control design approach. Moreover, their results provide plausible evidence that state minimum wage increases can have substantial adverse labor demand effects for low-skilled individuals that are outside previous elasticity estimates, ranging from −0.1 to −0.3.
The Effects of Social Security Taxes and Minimum Wages on Employment: Evidence from Turkey
Authors: Papps Kerry L.
Published: June 2015

Using worker-level panel data for the period from 2002 to 2005, the author analyzes the separate employment effects of increases in the social security taxes paid by employers and increases in the minimum wage in Turkey. Variation over time among low-wage workers in the ratio of total labor costs to the gross wage gives rise to a natural experiment. The author's regression estimates indicate that a given increase in social security taxes has a larger negative effect on the probability of a worker remaining employed in the next quarter than an equal size increase in the minimum wage. This result is incompatible with the textbook model of labor supply and demand, and it suggests that workers may increase effort in response to an increase in wages. The author's comparison of the employment responses of workers in different demographic groups provides some indirect evidence that the central finding is consistent with this explanation.
The New Great Debate about Unionism and Collective Bargaining in U.S. State and Local Governments
Authors: Lewin David , Keefe Jeffrey H. , Kochan Thomas A.
Published: June 2015

Recently some state and local governments in the United States have sharply reduced or eliminated public employee unionism and bargaining rights in the belief that their fiscal adversity stems mainly from overcompensation of public employees caused by collective bargaining. The authors examine public-private sector pay and benefit relationships, the effects of unions on public employee pay, the effectiveness of employment dispute resolution procedures, and the ability of public sector labor and management to combat fiscal adversity. They provide new evidence showing that: on balance, public employees are undercompensated relative to their private sector counterparts; the effects of unions on compensation are smaller in the public than in the private sector; and public sector dispute resolution procedures and joint labor-management initiatives to reform work function reasonably well.
Minimum Wages, Labor Market Institutions, and Female Employment: A Cross-Country Analysis
Authors: Addison John T. , Ozturk Orgul Demet
Published: June 2015

The authors investigate the employment consequences of minimum wage regulation for women in 16 OECD countries during 1970 to 2008. The treatment follows that of Neumark and Wascher's (2004) cross-country study using panel methods to estimate minimum wage effects among teenagers and young adults, although they focus on prime-age females—a group often neglected in the minimum wage literature. Moreover, their analysis covers a longer time interval and deploys time-varying policy and institutional regressors. They report average effects consistent with minimum wages causing material employment losses among the target group and, less conclusively, elevated joblessness as well. Their cross-country findings agree with Neumark and Wascher on the role of some individual labor market institutions and policies, but the authors do not observe the same patterns in the institutional data: specifically, prime-age females do not exhibit stronger employment losses in countries with the least regulated markets.
Changes in the Japanese Employment System in the Two Lost Decades
Authors: Hamaaki Junya , Hori Masahiro , Maeda Saeko , Murata Keiko
Published: June 2015

The authors re-examine developments in two key elements of the Japanese employment system, seniority-based wages and lifetime employment, using recent microdata from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure. In contrast with previous studies, the authors find evidence that these practices are eroding. For seniority wages, for example, they find that the age-wage profile has become flatter in recent years, especially for employees in the middle and final phase of their careers. And for lifetime employment, a clear downward trend has developed since the early 2000s in the share of lifetime employees among younger, university-educated workers. The findings suggest that a growing share of educated younger workers choose to leave indefinite-contract jobs due to the poor prospects for seniority-based wage progression, while older workers choose to stay in their present job despite stagnating wages, because it may be more difficult for them to find alternative employment.
Productivity, Capital, and Labor in Labor-Managed and Conventional Firms: An Investigation on French Data
Authors: Fakhfakh Fathi , Pérotin Virginie , Gago MÓnica
Published: June 2015

Using two new data sets from France, the authors present the first study of the comparative productivity of labor-managed and conventional firms involving large representative samples of firms in a range of industries including services. Their study offers new stylized facts on labor-managed firms, and disentangles incentive effects from those of differences in input demand behavior on factor elasticities. Contrary to received wisdom, labor-managed firms are not smaller than conventional firms; they grow as fast or faster in all industries. The two groups of firms organize production differently. Labor-managed firms are as productive as conventional firms, or more productive, in all industries, and use their inputs efficiently; but in several industries conventional firms would produce more with their current input levels if they organized production like labor-managed firms. On average overall, firms would produce more using the labor-managed firms' industry-specific technologies. Labor-managed firms do not produce at inefficiently low scales.
Works Councils and Establishment Productivity
Authors: Mueller Steffen
Published: June 2015

Declining union density in many industrialized countries increases interest in alternative forms of employee representation, such as works councils. The German works council is one of the most powerful forms of worker representation in developed countries, but little is known of its causal effect on productivity. The author used a large linked employer-employee panel data set to examine this issue. Comparing firms with and without a works council, the author finds that establishments with a works council are on average 6.4% more productive; but he also presents evidence that this figure underestimates the true productivity effect of works councils.
Do Employees Profit from Profit Sharing? Evidence from Canadian Panel Data
Authors: Long Richard J. , Fang Tony
Published: June 2015

Using panel data from a large sample of Canadian establishments, the authors examine whether there is any link between adoption of an employee profit-sharing plan and subsequent employee earnings. Overall, growth in employee earnings during the five-year period subsequent to adoption of profit sharing was significantly higher in establishments that had adopted profit sharing, as compared with those establishments that had not done so. Employees in establishments that paid high wages before profit sharing adoption appeared to benefit more than employees in other establishments, although employees in other establishments did eventually benefit from profit sharing.
Is the Clock Still Ticking? An Evaluation of the Consequences of Stopping the Tenure Clock
Authors: Manchester Colleen Flaherty , Leslie Lisa M. , Kramer Amit
Published: June 2015

Using a longitudinal administrative data set from a large research university, the authors empirically evaluate the consequences of using stop the clock (STC) policies for the career success of tenure track faculty. STC policies were introduced approximately 40 years ago, yet surprisingly little has been written about how they affect career outcomes. The prevalence of the ideal worker norm in academia raises the possibility of negative consequences as evaluators may treat STC policy use as a signal that the faculty member lacks sufficient commitment to his or her academic role. Consistent with this possibility, the authors find that faculty members who stop their clock for family reasons incur a salary penalty relative to faculty members who do not stop their clock, which cannot be explained by differences in productivity. Alternatively, faculty members who use the policy are not at a promotion disadvantage as compared with nonusers, and they actually have higher promotion rates.
Temporary Contracts and Work—Family Balance in a Dual Labor Market
Authors: Bonet Rocio , Cruz Cristina , Kranz Daniel Fernández , Justo Rachida
Published: June 2015

A well-established finding in the literature is that self-employment enables mothers to accommodate work and family needs better than when they are engaged in organizational employment. With this result in mind, the authors investigate within a dual system of job protection if women under temporary contracts face greater work-family conflicts than those under permanent contracts. The authors use data on women's work and fertility histories from the Spanish Continuous Sample of Working Histories to analyze whether women under temporary contracts transition to self-employment upon motherhood more than those who are under permanent contracts. Analyses show that being under a temporary contract increases women's likelihood of transitioning to self-employment upon childbirth. Supplementary analyses show that this is partly the result of voluntary transitions and not an employer's decision to terminate a temporary contract upon motherhood. Overall, these findings reveal a hidden cost of temporary contracts: the greater difficulty in balancing work and family.
Coal Mine Safety: Do Unions Make a Difference?
Authors: Morantz Alison D.
Published: June 2015

Although the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) has always advocated strongly for miners' safety, the empirical literature contains no evidence that unionization reduced mine injuries or fatalities during the 1970s and ′80s. The author uses an updated methodology and a more comprehensive data set than previous studies to examine the relationship between unionization and underground, bituminous coal mine safety from 1993 to 2010. She finds that unionization predicts a substantial and statistically significant decline in traumatic injuries and fatalities, the two safety measures that are the least prone to reporting bias. These results are especially pronounced among larger mines. Overall, unionization is associated with a 14 to 32% drop in traumatic injuries and a 29 to 83% drop in fatalities. Yet unionization also predicts higher total and nontraumatic injuries, suggesting that injury reporting practices differ between union and nonunion mines.
Unionization and Certified Sickness Absence: Norwegian Evidence
Authors: Mastekaasa Arne
Published: June 2015

The author analyzes the relationship between unionization and absences due to sickness in Norway using register data covering the entire population employed in the private sector during 2003 to 2007. A few previous studies have shown much higher sickness absence among unionized than nonunionized employees in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The author shows this is also true for Norway, although primarily for employees in lower grade jobs. The differential persists even when employees in the same detailed job category within the same establishment are compared using fixed effects models. Thus, differences between more or less unionized establishments, or differences in working conditions between members and nonmembers, fail to explain the differential. Analyses using individual fixed effects indicate that up to half of the union-nonunion differential in absence is due to selection on stable individual characteristics.
Union Density and Varieties of Coverage: The Anatomy of Union Wage Effects in Germany
Authors: Fitzenberger Bernd , Kohn Karsten , Lembcke Alexander C.
Published: June 2015

Collective bargaining in Germany takes place at either industry or firm level, and bargaining coverage is much higher than union density. The share of a firm's employees covered can vary between 0% and 100%, suggesting that researchers should distinguish union density, coverage at the firm level, and coverage at the individual level. Using linked employer-employee data, the authors estimate OLS and quantile regressions of wages on these dimensions of union influence. They find that a higher share of employees in a firm covered by industrywide or firm-specific contracts is associated with higher wages but find no clear-cut effect on wage dispersion. Yet, holding coverage at the firm level constant, individual coverage is associated with lower wages and less wage dispersion. Higher union density reinforces the effects of coverage. But for employees in firms without coverage, density's effect is negative and thus compresses the wage distribution in firms without coverage.
The Hidden Costs of High-Performance Work Practices: Evidence from a Large German Steel Company
Authors: Frick Bernd J. , Goetzen Ute , Simmons Robert
Published: June 2015

The authors use monthly data from 25 production units in a German steel plant over the period 1992 to 2001 to test for impacts of teamwork and performance-related pay on productivity, accidents, and absence rates. They find that teamwork and performance pay provide incentives to workers to increase quantity at the expense of quality and to run the machines for long hours instead of spending time on maintenance. Absenteeism increases when a combination of teamwork and performance pay is applied to production units that previously had neither. Results suggest that teamwork and performance pay can create hidden costs for manufacturers and do not necessarily increase worker productivity.
Competition, Takeovers, and Gender Discrimination
Authors: Heyman Fredrik , Svaleryd Helena , Vlachos Jonas
Published: June 2015

Theories of taste-based discrimination predict that competitive pressures will drive discriminatory behavior out of the market. The authors analyze how firm takeovers and product market competition affect firms' gender composition and gender wage gap using detailed matched employer-employee data. Taking into account several endogeneity concerns while using a difference- in- difference framework, they find that the share of female employees increases as a result of an ownership change when product market competition is weak. Furthermore, a takeover reduces the gender wage gap. Although the estimated effects are small, the results support the main theoretical predictions.
Do Unions Promote Members' Electoral Office Holding? Evidence from Correlates of State Legislatures' Occupational Shares
Authors: Sojourner Aaron J.
Published: June 2015

Controversies over the promise and the perils of union political influence have erupted around the United States. The author develops the first evidence on the degree to which labor unions develop members' political leadership in the broader community by studying the relationship between state legislators' occupations and the unionization rates of occupations across U.S. states. The fraction of legislators of a given occupation in a state increases with the occupation's rate of unionization in that state compared with the fraction of legislators of the same occupation in other states with lower unionization rates. This pattern shows up to varying degrees among the three public-sector and one private-sector occupations considered: K-12 teachers, police officers, firefighters, and construction workers. The pattern holds conditional on differences in observable state characteristics and when using state fixed effects. Although much research has described the role of unions in influencing economic outcomes and in politics through lobbying, campaign contributions, and voter mobilization, the author adds a new perspective on the role of unions in society. They promote elected political leadership by individuals from working- and middle-class jobs. Arguments over the social value of this role of unions are explored.
Effects of Unionization on Graduate Student Employees: Faculty-Student Relations, Academic Freedom, and Pay
Authors: Rogers Sean E. , Eaton Adrienne E. , Voos Paula B.
Published: June 2015

In cases involving unionization of graduate student research and teaching assistants at private U.S. universities, the National Labor Relations Board has, at times, denied collective bargaining rights on the presumption that unionization would harm faculty-student relations and academic freedom. Using survey data collected from PhD students in five academic disciplines across eight public U.S. universities, the authors compare represented and non-represented graduate student employees in terms of faculty-student relations, academic freedom, and pay. Unionization does not have the presumed negative effect on student outcomes, and in some cases has a positive effect. Union-represented graduate student employees report higher levels of personal and professional support, unionized graduate student employees fare better on pay, and unionized and nonunionized students report similar perceptions of academic freedom. These findings suggest that potential harm to faculty-student relationships and academic freedom should not continue to serve as bases for the denial of collective bargaining rights to graduate student employees.
Does Customer Auditing Help Chinese Workers?
Authors: He Guojun , Perloff Jeffrey M.
Published: June 2015

The authors find that auditing by downstream firms has limited effects on Chinese firms' adherence to labor standards and other measures of blue-collar workers' well-being. Auditing does not affect the supplier's blue-collar employees' wages, probability of belonging to a union, or likelihood of working overtime. Audited firms, however, are more likely to provide rural migrant workers (who usually face discrimination) with government-sponsored medical insurance, business medical insurance, and unemployment insurance.