We consider a tournament between two workers of different abilities who choose both human capital investment and effort. The employer can influence the workers’ behavior by determining the sequence of human capital investments, i.e. the training design. The workers can either invest simultaneously or sequentially with the favorite being the first mover or sequentially with the underdog as first...

A B S T R AC T I estimate the effects of trade unions on employee and employer perceptions of workplace management–employee relations in Britain using linked employer–employee data from the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey. Associations between these relations and unionization vary with institutional arrangements in relation to bargaining and lay representation. There is support for McC...

Proposals to expand the individual health insurance market and promote health savings accounts are intended to provide consumers with more "choice." The types of choices people prefer, however, are not well understood. This analysis of survey data finds that having a choice of health care providers matters more to people than having a choice of health plans. Dissatisfaction among adults with no...

Pension Plan Characteristics and Framing Effects in Employee Savings Behavior In this paper we document the importance of framing effects in the retirement savings decisions of college professors. Pensions in many post-secondary institutions are funded by a combination of an employer contribution and a mandatory employee contribution. Employees can also make tax-deferred contributions to a supp...

Of all the decisions that managers of SME have to make, laying off someone is the most difficult as well as the hardest to live with. Layoffs are often seen as a personal failure with mental and psychological consequences that can be disastrous for both the person laid off and the employer responsible. Curiously, the suffering experienced by the employer is never mentioned in the SME context. T...

This paper revisits the no-attachment assumption in job search models with random productivity fluctuations and Nash-bargaining. Both workers and firms value the option to remain in attachment: firms profit from a reduced hiring cost, while workers gain from a higher reservation wage when bargaining with a new employer. Ex-post differentiation of workers into attached and unattached unemployed ...

Suppose there is a principal-agent relationship between employer and employee in which effort is not contractible, but is elicited through employer incentive mechanisms. We term preferences that allow the employer to elicit effort at lower cost incentive enhancing. We analyze how such preferences affect earnings, nd then provide evidence that one of the relevant behavioral traits, efficacy, as ...

Taller workers earn on average higher salaries. Recent research has proposed cognitive abilities and social skills as explanations for the height-wage premium. Another possible mechanism, employer discrimination, has found little support. In this paper, we provide some evidence in favor of the discrimination hypothesis. Using a cross section of 13 countries, we show that there is a consistent h...

We experimentally investigate a repeated “inspection game” where, in the stage game, an employee can either work or shirk and an employer simultaneously chooses to inspect or not inspect. The unique equilibrium of the stage game is in mixed strategies with positive probabilities of shirking/inspecting while combined payoffs are maximized when the employee works and the employer does not inspect...