Industrial Relations最新文献

Is extensive work effort always detrimental to professionals’ well-being? We argue that the link between extensive work effort and well-being depends on the reasons why professionals work extended hours. Drawing on self-determination theory and data from an international consultancy firm, we show that extrinsically driven work effort is negatively related to well-being, while intrinsically driven work effort is positively related to well-being. A reinforcing effect seems to exist between the two types of motivators, revealing that intrinsically driven work effort has both a direct and an indirect link to well-being, mitigating the downsides of extrinsically driven work effort.

We identify the causal effects of student characteristics on the likelihood of being hired for an apprenticeship and explore the mechanisms underlying the employer’s decision. To this end, we perform a vignette experiment among human resources professionals in Belgium, focusing on less-qualified youth. Our results indicate that students with favorable educational records and students revealing being motivated are more likely to obtain an apprenticeship. Furthermore, we find that these characteristics are used by human resources professionals as signals of trainability, employability, and quit intentions.

This study investigates the effect of pension age on hospitalization for cardiovascular diseases using administrative social security and hospital discharge records in Italy. The endogeneity of the retirement decision is addressed using an instrumental variable strategy exploiting the exogenous variation in pension age determined by quarter of birth. Results indicate a detrimental effect of higher pension age only for retirees who, before retirement, were suffering worse health and were employed in lower quality and more physically demanding jobs. Among them, a 1-year delay in pension claiming increases the risk of hospitalization for cardiovascular diseases by approximately 2.6 percentage points.

This article examines the relationship between teachers’ unions and teacher turnover in U.S. public schools. The trade-off between teacher pay and employment predicts that unions raise the dismissal rate of underperforming teachers but reduce the attrition of high-quality teachers, as the higher wages unions negotiate provide districts strong incentives to scrutinize teacher performance during a probationary period while encouraging high-quality teachers to remain in teaching. Using the district–teacher matched data and a natural experiment, I find that, compared to less-unionized districts, highly unionized districts dismiss more low-quality teachers and retain more high-quality teachers, raising average teacher quality and educational outcomes.

Job training is one of the most important aspects of skill formation and human capital accumulation. In this study, we use longitudinal Canadian linked employer–employee data to examine whether white/visible minority immigrants and Canadian-born emplooyees experience different opportunities in two well-defined measures of firm-sponsored training: on-the-job training and classroom training. While we find no differences in on-the-job training between different groups, our results suggest that visible minority immigrants are significantly less likely to receive classroom training, and receive fewer and shorter classroom training courses, an experience that is not shared by white immigrants. For male visible minority immigrants, these gaps are entirely driven by their differential sorting into workplaces with fewer training opportunities. For their female counterparts, however, they are mainly driven by differences that emerge within workplaces. We find no evidence that years spent in Canada or education level can appreciably reduce these gaps. Accounting for potential differences in career paths and hierarchical level also fails to explain these differences. We find, however, that these gaps are only experienced by visible minority immigrants who work in the for-profit sector, with those in the nonprofit sector experiencing positive or no gaps in training. Finally, we show that other poor labor market outcomes of visible minority immigrants, including their wages and promotion opportunities, stem in part from these training gaps.

This article examines the relationship between corporate governance and corporate sustainability by focusing on an essential component of companies' governance structure: executive compensation programs. We propose an original empirical strategy based on a large set of the biggest capitalizations in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries over the period 2004–2018, with explicit measures of how companies integrate into executive managers' remuneration precise criteria of corporate social responsibility, an incentive scheme called corporate social responsibility (CSR) contracting. Our results show that proposing executive compensation programs including CSR criteria has a negative impact on financial performance, and a large positive impact on extra-financial performance based on the following dimensions: relationship with customers and suppliers, and community involvement. Second, we explore the moderating role of the corporate governance model by distinguishing the impact between firms with a shareholder or stakeholder corporate governance model and reveal significant differences in the impact of CSR contracting. For firms with a stakeholder corporate governance model, CSR contracting is no longer associated with a fall of financial performance and has a large positive impact on human resources, environmental, and human rights performance. On the other hand, CSR contracting has a negative impact on financial performance but no impact on extra-financial performance for firms with a shareholder corporate governance model.

We inspect the heterogeneous association between tasks and wages across genders using individual-level data on U.S. workers. Our findings suggest that women receive a higher wage premium when engaged in cognitive tasks and experience more contained wage losses when performing manual activities. However, a wage penalty characterizes women engaged in highly social intensive jobs. Further inspection reveals that this result is especially driven by the teamwork component of social activities.

Bosses play a fundamental role in workplaces. Yet, almost nothing is known about an important and basic question in labor economics and industrial relations. Are the right people promoted to be supervisors, team leaders, and managers? The infamous Peter Principle claims that incompetent bosses are likely to be all around us, but is that true? This article provides the first statistically representative international estimates—taking comparable data on thirty-five nations—of the extent to which employees have “bad bosses.” Using a natural measure, the article calculates that approximately 13 percent of Europe’s workers have a bad boss. Such bosses are most common in large organizations, in organizations without employee-representation committees, in the transport sector, and where workers themselves have no supervisory responsibility. Last, the article offers a practical finding as a potential aid to human resource training and hiring. Contrary to media portrayals, bad bosses are rated least bad on “respect for workers” and worst on their ability to get the job done. Lack of competence, not lack of consideration, appears to be the key problem.

Raising the minimum wage has been advanced as complementary policy to comprehensive immigration reform to improve low-skilled immigrants’ economic well-being. While adverse labor demand effects could undermine this goal, existing studies do not detect evidence of negative employment effects. We re-investigate this question using data from the 1994 to 2016 Current Population Survey and conclude that minimum wage increases reduced employment of less-educated Hispanic immigrants, with estimated elasticities of around –0.1. However, we also find that the wage and employment effects of minimum wages on low-skilled immigrants diminished over the last decade. This finding is consistent with more restrictive state immigration policies and the Great Recession inducing outmigration of low-skilled immigrants, as well as immigrants moving into the informal sector. Finally, our results show that raising the minimum wage is an ineffective policy tool for reducing poverty among immigrants.

We investigate the signalling effect related to participation in active labor-market programs. To this end, we conduct an experiment in which human resources professionals make hiring decisions concerning fictitious job candidates who apply either under a job-vacancy referral system or directly. We provide first causal evidence for a substantial adverse effect of referral on the probability of being hired. In addition, we find that employers perceive referred candidates as being less motivated than other candidates.