In Brazil, workers without a formal job contract comprise more than half of the labor force, a contingent formed mainly by women. This study presents estimates of the annual incidence of non-fatal work-related injuries and their distribution by gender and type of job contract in an urban area of Brazil. This was a community-based study with a random cluster area sample of the inhabitants from t...

We explore the relationship between education, earnings and fixed-term contracts using data from the 1997 British Social Attitudes Survey and the 1997 International Social Survey Programme . We find that workers employed under such contracts earn significantly lower wages than their ‘permanent’ contract counterparts, even after controlling for a plethora of personal and job characteristics. Thi...

Long Term Earnings Inequality, Earnings Instability and Temporary Employment in Spain: 1993–2000 This paper provides a longitudinal perspective on changes in Spanish male earnings inequality for the period 1993-2000, by decomposing the earnings covariance structure into its permanent and transitory parts. According to the Spanish sample of the European Community Household Panel, cross-sectional...

OBJECTIVES Changes in employment contracts may impact the quality of working life, job insecurity, health and work-related attitudes. We examined the validity of two partly competing theoretical approaches. Based upon a segmentation approach, we expected no change in scores among stable trajectories, whereas upward trajectories were expected to be for the better and downward trajectories to be ...

How important are self-control problems at work? We describe a field experiment with data entry workers designed to answer this question. We examine two proxies for self-control and find evidence on both. First, workers’ effort increases as the (randomly assigned) payday gets closer, with productivity increases on paydays corresponding to 7% of mean daily production. Second, when given the choi...

OBJECTIVES To reveal the effect of age and other factors on perceived anxiety over radiation exposure among decontamination workers in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan. METHODS A survey questionnaire was sent to 1505 workers, with questions regarding age, presence of a written employment contract, previous residence, radiation passbook ownership, presence of close persons for consultation, knowled...

Psychologists have consistently documented people’s tendency to be overconfident about their own ability. We interpret workers’ confidence in their own skills as their morale, and investigate the implication of worker overconfidence on the firm’s optimal wage-setting policies. In our model, a wage contract both provides incentives and conveys to the worker the firm’s opinion about her ability, ...