We estimate an agency model using the payroll records of a copper mine that paid a production bonus to teams of workers. We estimate the cost of incomplete information due to insurance and incentives considerations and the inefficiency caused by the simple form of the incentive contract itself. At the estimated parameters the cost of worker risk aversion (insurance) is of similar magnitude to m...

— This study argues that the coordination of workplace changes brought about by increased flexibility attained through the utilization of contract labor is fraught with tension, which influences the ways in which employment relationships are shaped in the context of any given firm. The essence of such tension lies in the pursuit of organizational flexibility and quality control in the productio...

Workers (especially, competent personnel) have been recognized as a core contributor to overall organizational effectiveness. Hence, verifying the determinants of turnover intention is one of the most important research issues. This study tested the influence of perceived organizational support and abusive supervision on employee’s turnover intention. In addition, mediating roles of psychologic...

Uniquely in the industrialized world, the United States has long had the presumption that employers may legally fire workers “at will,” that is, “for good cause, bad cause, or no cause at all.” During the 1970’s and 1980’s, this presumption eroded rapidly: most U.S. state courts created three classes of common-law restrictions that limited employers’ ability to fire. These exceptions garnered m...

Noting the trend toward more independent trade unions in developing countries, this article examines whether the presence of unions strengthens or weakens the benefits to be gained from economic policy reform. We show that the presence of “passive” unions—ones that choose their wage-employment contract given the firm’s cost-minimizing strategy—increases the welfare gains from trade liberalizati...

Modelling the incidence of self-employment has traditionally proved problematic. Whilst the individual supply side characteristics of the self-employed are well documented, the literature has largely neglected (or misspecified) demand side aspects. In this paper we present results from an econometric framework that allows us to separately, and simultaneously, model the supply and demand side ch...

Biomonitoring of workers and communities raises important legal and ethical concerns, but the two contexts are different. Monitoring workers is usually done by, or at the instigation of, the employer who, in law, is responsible for their health and safety. Whenever worker monitoring leads to the removal of workers, difficult issues emerge affecting labor-management relations, labor law, and dis...

Motivated by the desire for high-throughput public databases (i.e., “blockchains”), we design incentive compatible protocols that run “off-chain”, but rely on an existing cryptocurrency to implement a reward and/or punishment mechanism. Our protocols are incentive compatible in the sense that behaving honestly is a weak Nash equilibrium, even in spite of potentially malicious behavior from a sm...

The aim of this study is to investigate whether nonpaid volunteers have other reasons to be a member of an organization than paid workers. Volunteers are assumed to be hard to manage, because there is no ‘‘stick of a paid contract’’ to keep them in line. Therefore, we studied different dimensions (i.e., affective, normative, and continuance) of organizational commitment of volunteers and paid w...