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Using a panel survey, the authors investigate how the welfare of rural-urban migrant workers in China is affected by trade union presence at the workplace. Controlling for individual fixed effects, they find the following. Relative to workers from workplaces without union presence or with inactive unions, both union-covered non-members and union members in workplaces with active unions earn higher monthly income, are more likely to have a written contract, be covered by social insurances, receive fringe benefits, express work-related grievances through official channels, feel more satisfied with their lives, and are less likely to have mental health problems.

The relatively few examples of commercially funded condition-specific bundled payments provide insights into how to spread this alternative payment model further in the private insurance market.

In this paper, we examine how two regionally implemented environmental initiatives in China have impacted the innovation ability of Chinese-listed firms. The regional implementation of these policies, with non-policy regions serving as controls, offers researchers the perfect conditions for a natural experiment. Using research and development (R&D) expenditures and patents as a proxy for innovativeness, we compare the record of innovation of firms inside the policy zones with firms outside the policy zones. We use a Difference-In-Difference-In-Differences (DIDID) method to eliminate endogeneity and take the quality of the patents into account by incorporating sub-items. Results show only one of the regulations had a positive effect and that low quality patents account for most of the innovation. We conclude that reasonably designed environmental regulations, when implemented regionally in competitive industries, do improve Chinese firms' innovation ability in line with the Porter Hypothesis. The results help us derive some useful policy implications regarding innovation.

Firms hire workers to undertake tasks and activities associated with particular occupations, which makes occupations a fundamental unit in economic analyses of the labor market. Using a unique dataset on pay in identically defined occupations in developing and advanced countries, we find that in most countries occupational skill premia narrowed substantially from the 1950s to the 1980s, then widened through the 2000s, creating a U-shaped pattern of change. The narrowing was due in part to the huge worldwide increase in the supply of educated workers. The subsequent widening was due in part to the weakening of trade unions and a shift in demand to more skilled workers associated with rising trade. The data indicate that supply, demand, and institutional forces are all drivers of occupational skill premia, ruling out simple single factor explanations of change. The paper concludes with a call for improving the collection of occupational wage data to understand future changes in the world of work.

This paper presents an Agent-Based Model (ABM) that seeks to explain the concordance of sluggish growth of productivity and of real wages found in macro-economic statistics, and the increased dispersion of firm productivity and worker earnings found in micro level statistics in advanced economies at the turn of the 21st century. It shows that a single market process unleashed by the decline of unionization can account for both the macro and micro economic phenomena, and that deunionization can be modeled as an endogenous outcome of competition between high wage firms seeking to raise productive capacity and low productivity firms seeking to cut wages. The model highlights the antipodal competitive dynamics between a “winner-takes-all economy” in which corporate strategies focused on cost reductions lead to divergence in productivity and wages and a “social market economy” in which competition rewards the accumulation of firm-level capabilities and worker skills with a more egalitarian wage structure.

‘Voice’ is a term that has been widely used in the practitioner and academic literature on human resource management (HRM), organizational behaviour (OB) and industrial relations in recent years. In their seminal work, Freeman and Medoff (1984) associated voice with union monopoly representation and in particular with the role of unions articulating concerns on behalf of the collective. As such, union voice was viewed as an integral part of democratic representation in the workplace, but which also could bring about benefits for employers. With the fall in union density and coverage, analysis of voice in workplaces has shifted to how workers communicate with managers and are able to express their concerns about their work situation without a union, and on the ways in which employees have a say over work tasks and organizational decision-making (Kochan et al., 2019). But researchers from different disciplinary perspectives often use ‘voice’ in different ways. Some refer to involvement, others to participation, while yet others refer to empowerment or engagement, as if they are interchangeable. As Kaufman (Chapter 2 in this volume) makes clear, few appreciate the historical pedigree of employee voice, for instance the importance to which Karl Marx and Adam Smith attached interest in the ways and means through which labour expressed its voice. The deeper antecedents to voice have often been forgotten or eclipsed in a rush towards newer managerial fads, such as engagement, or other equally abstract notions of labour offering discretionary effort.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review the historical background for broad-based ownership in the USA, the development of forms of employee ownership and profit sharing in the USA, the research literature on employee ownership and profit sharing and related employee participation, the development of policy and options for new policies.Design/methodology/approachIt is a literature review.FindingsThere are four reasons to be interested in employee stock ownership and profit sharing today: first, employee share ownership and profit sharing can increase worker pay and wealth and broaden the overall distribution of income and wealth, a key ingredient for a successful democracy. To be a tool for reducing inequality, employee stock ownership and profit sharing must be spread more widely and meaningfully than it is today. Second, employee share ownership and profit sharing provide incentives for more effort, cooperation, information sharing and innovation that can improve workplace performance and company productivity. Third, employee share ownership and profit sharing can save jobs by enhancing firm survival and employment stability, with wider economic benefits that come from decreasing unemployment. Fourth, employee share ownership and profit sharing can create more harmonious workplaces with greater corporate transparency and increased worker involvement in their work lives through access to information and participation in workplace decisions.Research limitations/implicationsGrowth has been extraordinarily sluggish in the recovery from the Great Recession and has weakened in advanced countries over a longer period, leading some analysts to believe that the authors have entered a new economic era of small to modest growth. This may turn out to be true, which will increase the importance of growth-enhancing policies. The evidence that firms with employee stock ownership and/or profit-sharing perform better than others suggests that policies that extend ownership would boost the country’s lagging growth rate. The evidence that employee share ownership firms preserve jobs and survive recessions better than others suggests that policies that extend ownership could help stabilize the economy when the next recession comes down the pike.Practical implicationsBecause there may be informational or institutional barriers about the benefits of ownership and sharing and the ways firms can introduce such programs that government can help overcome. Government has often played a role in promoting performance-enhancing work practices to enhance overall economy-wide outcomes from higher productivity and innovation, such as the long history of agricultural extension services (since 1887) to spread information on best practices in farming, and employer education on safety practices conducted by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.Social implicationsBecause of the “externalities” – effects that extend beyond the firm and its members – that greater ownership/profit sharing can bring us. If employee ownership and profit sharing lead to fewer layoffs and firm closures, this can reduce recession-created drops in consumer purchasing power and aggregate demand; government expenditures on unemployment compensation and other forms of support; decreased tax base for supporting schools and infrastructure; and potentially harmful social and personal effects, such as marital breakups and alcohol abuse. Apart from unemployment, more broadly shared prosperity and lower inequality may also have wider benefits for macroeconomic growth, stability and societal outcomes, as described by a number of social scientists. To the extent the ownership and profit sharing is a public good, a nudge in policy to consider the idea makes sense.Originality/valueBecause it is hard to find policy options that are as bipartisan as the shares policy. In The Citizens’ Share, and in other articles and venues, the authors lay out the areas in which there is evidence or logic for in-depth development of, and experimentation with, several broad policy directions, with the details to be worked out by members of Congress based on their deliberations.

Employee share purchase plans (ESPPs) give free or discounted shares of stock to workers who buy shares in the hope that the greater share ownership will retain workers, build loyalty and raise productivity, as in gift exchange models. Using measures of workers’ organizational loyalty and sense of ownership in a multinational firm that puts the ESPP at the heart of its compensation policy, we find that workers who join the ESPP have lower turnover intentions and do less on‐the‐job search than others, motivated in part by gift exchange reciprocity, and also respond to the group incentive of ownership with greater work effort, longer hours, and lower absence rates. Workers in workplaces with high perceived rates of ESPP participation are more likely to intervene against shirkers. The results appear robust to the selectivity of who joins the ESPP. The mix of gifting shares to workers who buy shares and the group incentive of ownership makes ESPPs a unique dual form of compensation.

This paper finds that U.S. employment changed differently relative to output in the Great Recession and recovery than in most other advanced countries or in the United States in earlier recessions. Instead of hoarding labor, U.S. firms reduced employment proportionately more than output in the Great Recession, with establishments that survived the downturn contracting jobs massively. Diverging from the aggregate pattern, U.S. manufacturers reduced employment less than output while the elasticity of employment to gross output varied widely among establishments. In the recovery, growth of employment was dominated by job creation in new establishments. The variegated responses of employment to output challenges extant models of how enterprises adjust employment over the business cycle.

Deceased donor research remains an elusive goal for improving organ utilization and function. Many working in this field have cited the barriers that impede the conduct of such trials. Recent reports from the Academy of Medicine and individual authors provide a general framework on which a National Donor Research Program could be built. This paper provides one observer's viewpoint on how such a program could be operationalized.

Using numbers of industrial robots shipped to primarily manufacturing industries as a supply shock to an industry labor market, we estimate that an additional robot reduces employment by roughly two to three workers overall and by three to four workers when robots are likely to be good substitutes for humans. The supply shock also reduces wages. The estimates far exceed those of an additional immigrant on employment and wages. While growth of robots in the 2000s was too modest to be a major determinant of wages and employment, the estimated effects suggest that continued exponential growth of industrial robots could disrupt job markets in the foreseeable future and thus merit attention from analysts and policymakers concerned about the economic well-being of workers.

This article is the second in a series to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the ILR Review. The series features articles that analyze the state of research and future directions for important themes this journal has featured over many years of publication.In this article, the authors assess the credibility of research that has tested the theoretical contests between the monopoly and the collective voice model of unions developed by Freeman and Medoff in What Do Unions Do? The authors go beyond prior analyses by examining more than 2,000 estimates that consider the effects of unions on a broad range of organizational and individual outcomes, including productivity, productivity growth, capital investment, profits, and job satisfaction. They advance our understanding of the current empirical findings and credibility of this research by using meta-statistical analysis to evaluate research quality, publication selection bias, statistical power, and heterogeneity. The authors conclude that compared to other areas of economics, research on union effects has lower bias but larger problems of statistical power. They argue that Freeman and Medoff’s monopoly–collective voice model helped produce more credible results, and they suggest ways to reduce the power and heterogeneity problems in existing research.

By examining the ethnic identity of authors in over 2.5 million scientific papers written by US-based authors from 1985 to 2008, we find that persons of similar ethnicity coauthor together more frequently than predicted by their proportion among authors. The greater homophily is associated with publication in lower-impact journals and with fewer citations. Meanwhile, papers with authors in more locations and with longer reference lists get published in higher-impact journals and receive more citations. These findings suggest that diversity in inputs by author ethnicity, location, and references leads to greater contributions to science as measured by impact factors and citations.

Voice is a term that has been widely used in the practitioner and academic literature on human resource management (HRM) and industrial relations in recent years. Freeman and Medoff (1984) associated voice with union representation and in particular with the role of unions in articulating concerns on behalf of the collective. As union density has fallen in recent years, analysis of voice in workplaces has often focused on how workers communicate with managers and are able to express their concerns about their work situation without a union, and on the ways in which employees have a say over work tasks and organizational decision-making. But researchers from different disciplinary perspectives often use voice in different ways. Some refer to involvement, others to participation, while yet others refer to empowerment or engagement as if they are interchangeable. As Kaufman (Chapter 2) makes clear, few appreciate the historical pedigree of employee voice, for instance, where Karl Marx and Adam Smith expressed interest in the ways and means through which labour expressed its voice. The deeper antecedents to voice have often been forgotten or eclipsed in a rush towards newer managerial fads, such as engagement or other equally abstract notions of labour offering discretionary effort. This book presents analysis from various academic streams and disciplines that illuminate our understanding of employee voice from these different perspectives. The following chapters show that research on employee voice has gone beyond union voice and non-union voice to build a wider and deeper knowledge base. As the introduction to the book, this chapter provides a guide to the debates about the different dimensions of employee voice and to the research findings in different areas. We review the meanings and purposes surrounding the definitions of voice; consider the role of key actors in the workplace; and evaluate the different forms and processes of voice in different spheres, contexts and organizational settings. We hope that the book will help the reader understand the debates associated with employee voice and appreciate the contribution of the different approaches to our understanding of what goes on in the workplaces that are at the heart of modern economies.

China's new Labor Contract Law took effect on January 2008 and required firms to give migrant workers written contracts, strengthened labor protections for workers and contained penalties for firms that did not follow the labor code. This paper uses survey data of migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta before and after the law and a retrospective question on when workers received their first labor contract to assess the effects of the law on labor outcomes. The evidence shows that the new law increased the percentage of migrant workers with written contracts, which in turn raised social insurance coverage, reduced the likelihood of wage arrears, and raised the likelihood that the worker had a union at their workplace.

The 2008–2009 recession created major budgetary problems in US cities and states. Conservative Republicans who had triumphed in many state elections in 2010 introduced laws to weaken or eliminate public sector bargaining on the grounds that it contributed to the deficits and hampered government responses to the crisis. Unions and their allies fought back in an effort to preserve collective bargaining and unionism in its last stronghold in the country. This article finds that states with public sector bargaining laws have higher debt-to-state gross domestic product (GDP) ratios and slightly higher deficits than states without such laws, but that the dominant cause of the budgetary problem was the recession, and that unions gave sizable wage and benefit concessions to deal with the crisis. The main motivations for the attack appear to be political opportunism and ideological opposition to governments bargaining with their employees. The majority of citizens favored maintaining public sector bargaining. The backlash from unions and their supporters to the attack in two key states, Ohio and Wisconsin, was sufficiently vigorous to suggest that the long-run effects of the war on collective bargaining may boomerang against the opponents of unionization.

This paper examines unionism’s relationship to the size of the middle class and its relationship to intergenerational mobility. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) 1985 and 2011 files are used to examine the change in the share of workers in a middle-income group (defined by persons having incomes within 50 percent of the median) and use a shift-share decomposition to explore how the decline of unionism contributes to the shrinking middle class. The files are also used to investigate the correlation between parents’ union status and the incomes of their children. Additionally, federal income tax data is used to examine the geographical correlation between union density and intergenerational mobility. Findings include that union workers are disproportionately in the middle-income group or above, and some reach middle-income status due to the union wage premium; the offspring of union parents have higher incomes than the offspring of otherwise comparable non-union parents, especially when the parents are low-skilled; and offspring from communities with higher union density have higher average incomes relative to their parents compared to offspring from communities with lower union density. These findings show a strong, though not necessarily causal, link between unions, the middle class, and intergenerational mobility.

Wall Street's 2007-09 implosion and the ensuing global recession highlight the crucial relationship between finance and the economy. Governments, inter- national agencies and experts had failed to detect rising risk levels in the deregulated financial sector. The author outlines the resulting huge cost in lost jobs and likely reductions in public goods and growth, as economies restabilize budgets after paying for massive bailouts and stimulus packages. Specifically, he assesses the role of mon- etary incentives for rent-seeking in the decisions that led to the crisis. Finally, he makes the case for radical reform of the institutions linking finance and the real economy. n December 2009, the largest trucking firm in the United States, YRC, with I over 30,000 truck drivers on its payroll was close to bankruptcy. The firm was financially stressed not so much because its revenues were falling in the recession but because it owed US$1.6 billion in loans and bonds for acquisitions it had made in 2003 and 2005.1 To survive, YRC had to convince bondholders to swap bonds for equity. Ten or 20 years earlier, bondholders would readily have made the ex- change, since their bonds would essentially have proved worthless if the YRC had gone bankrupt. But in the 2000s era of financialization, Wall Street firms had issued credit default swaps (CDSs) against YRC bonds.2 Investors with CDSs who bought bonds and voted against restructuring would make more from the CDSs than they would lose from the bonds. Goldman Sachs developed a market in YRC bonds and CDSs, soliciting bonds for clients who would benefit from a 1 2

This paper documents the five main ways in which globalization of scientific and engineering has proceeded: (1) expansion of mass higher education worldwide; (2) growth in number of international students; (3) immigration of scientists and engineers; (4) non-immigration trips: academic visitors, conferences; (5) greater international co-authorship and co-patenting. It is argued that by accelerating the rate of technological change and speeding the adoption of best practices around the world, these developments should benefit advanced and developing countries but that they threaten the comparative advantage of advanced countries in high-tech sectors and the edge that their citizens have in access to the highest quality university education and jobs; and risk creating greater divisions between modern and traditional sectors in developing countries. How economies around the world take advantage of the benefits and minimize the costs of globalization of knowledge will be a major determinant of economic progress.

While the United States welcomes foreign-born students and trainees and, less warmly, temporary workers such as H-1B visa holders, it places an array of requirements, obstacles, and delays upon persons who would like to make the U.S. their permanent home. The number of people in the queue for legal permanent residence (LPR) is, however, difficult to ascertain. This paper estimates the number of highly skilled foreign-born persons waiting for LPR via the three main employment-based categories, separately by whether they are living in the United States or abroad, as well as the number of family members. We find that as of the end of FY 2006 there were about half a million employment-based principals awaiting LPR in the United States, together with over half a million family members, plus over 125 thousand principals and family members waiting abroad. These numbers dwarf the visas available annually – 120,120 plus any not used in the family preferences – suggesting that the long delays in gaining legal permanent residence are a visa number problem, not an administrative processing problem, as many believe. The backlog thus cannot be eliminated without a large change in public policy. The delay in gaining legal permanent residence could contribute to the decision of many highly skilled foreign-born to leave the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Federal legislation has been proposed to modify the National Organ Transplant Act in a way that would permit government-regulated strategies, including financial incentives, to be implemented and evaluated. The Council and Ethics Committee of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons conducted a brief web-based survey of its members' (n = 449, 41.6% response rate) views on acceptable or unacceptable strategies to increase organ donation. The majority of the membership supports reimbursement for funeral expenses, an income tax credit on the final return of a deceased donor and an income tax credit for registering as an organ donor as strategies for increasing deceased donation. Payment for lost wages, guaranteed health insurance and an income tax credit are strategies most strongly supported by the membership to increase living donation. For both deceased and living donation, the membership is mostly opposed to cash payments to donors, their estates or to next-of-kin. There is strong support for a government-regulated trial to evaluate the potential benefits and harms of financial incentives for both deceased and living donation. Overall, there is strong support within the ASTS membership for changes to NOTA that would permit the implementation and careful evaluation of indirect, government-regulated strategies to increase organ donation.

Candidates for, and recipients of, transplants face numerous risks that receive varying degrees of attention from the media and transplant professionals. Characterizations such as 'high risk donor' are not necessarily accurate or informative unless they are discussed in context with the other risks patients face before and after transplantation. Moreover, such labels do not provide accurate information for informed consent discussions or decision making. Recent cases of donor-transmitted diseases from donors labeled as being at 'high risk' have engendered concern, new policy proposals and attempts to employ additional testing of donors. The publicity and policy reactions to these cases do not necessarily better inform transplant candidates and recipients about these risks. Using comparative risk analysis, we compare the various risks associated with waiting on the list, accepting donors with various risk characteristics, posttransplant survival and everyday risks we all face in modern life to provide some quantitative perspective on what 'high risk' really means for transplant patients. In our analysis, donor-transmitted disease risks are orders of magnitude less than other transplantation risks and similar to many everyday occupational and recreational risks people readily and willingly accept. These comparisons can be helpful for informing patients and guiding future policy development.

This paper examines cross-country differences in labour policies and practices and employee performance and attitudes toward work from a sample of nearly 30,000 employees in a large multinational manufacturing firm. The analysis shows: 1) large establishment and country differences in work practices, performance, and attitudes toward work across countries; 2) qualitatively similar responses of workers to work practices across countries; 3) a strong link between the establishment average of employee reports on the quality of labour-management relations and establishment average measures of employee performance 4) a positive relation between average employee performance and average employee-management relations at the country level, but no relation between country level performance in the firm and measures of the extent of national labour regulations or practices.

In the past two decades China leaped from bit player in global science and engineering (S&E) to become the world's largest source of S&E graduates and the second largest spender on research and development and the second largest producer of scientific papers. As a latecomer to modern S&E, China trailed the United States and other advanced countries in the quality of its universities and research but was improving both through the mid-2010s. This chapter presents evidence that China's leap benefited greatly from the country's positive response to global opportunities to educate many of its best and brightest overseas and from the deep educational and research links it developed with the United States. The findings suggest that global mobility of people and ideas allowed China to reach the scientific and technological frontier much faster and more efficiently.

Robots, that is any sort of machinery from computers to artificial intelligence programs that provides a good substitute for work currently performed by humans, can increasingly replace workers, even highly skilled professionals, and thus reduce opportunities for good jobs and pay. But, with appropriate policies, the higher productivity due to robots can improve worker well-being by raising incomes and creating greater leisure for workers. Consider the way Google reduces the need for reference librarians and research assistants, or the way massive open online courses reduce the need for professors and lecturers. How these new technologies affect worker well-being and inequality depends on who owns them.

This paper argues that detailed studies of particular economies, such as Bob Gregory%u2019s work on Australia, are relevant to all of economics. The paper builds on the concept of a model species from biology to develop the notion of a model economy %u2013 one whose experiences illuminate fundamental economic issues; examines the criterion for an economy to serve as a model economy; and describes three areas %u2013 labour relations and the awards system of wage-setting, marketizing public services and growth through immigration and natural resources %u2013 where Australian experience provides insights into economic behaviour and the operation of markets broadly.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine innovative union use of the internet in the 2000s and to see whether the major union innovations in the USA and UK mark the advent of “open source” union structures.Design/methodology/approachReviews two important innovations, www.workingamerica.org and www.unionreps.org.uk Examines how they may fit with the open source union design.FindingsBoth the AFL‐CIO and US union efforts to develop open source union forms and the TUC and UK union efforts to improve services to workers and members through the internet mark the advent of the open source union form. The two countries have different approaches to this innovation, which reflect the differing problems faced by unions in the USA and UK. In both countries, unions will have to find the appropriate mix of on‐line and off‐line activities to create stable open source organizations.Originality/valueNo other paper has examined union use of the internet in terms of creating the new open source union form.

The low cost of information, communication, and interaction on the web offers trade unions opportunities to improve services and attract members, and thus reinvent themselves for the twenty-first century. The authors argue that unions can use the web to: develop virtual minority unions at many non-union firms; improve services to members; enhance democracy in unions; aid in industrial disputes; and strengthen the international labour community. They conclude that, if unions fail to exploit the opportunities on the web to gain members, other organizations are likely to provide services to workers on the internet.

Richard B. Freeman and Wei Huang reflect on a link between a team's ethnic mix and highly cited papers.

Executive SummaryGlobalization of scientific and technological knowledge has reduced the US share of world scientific activity, increased the foreign-born proportion of scientists and engineers in US universities and in the US labor market, and led to greater US scientific collaborations with other countries. China’s massive investments in university education and research and development (R&D) have, in particular, made it a special partner for the United States in scientific work. These developments have substantial implications for US science and technology policy. This paper suggests that aligning immigration policies more closely to the influx of international students, granting fellowships to students working on turning scientific and technological advances into commercial innovations, and requiring firms with R&D tax credits or other government R&D funding develop “impact plans” to use their new knowledge to produce innovative products or processes in the United States could help the country adjust ...

This paper links data on establishments and individuals to analyze the role of establishments in the increase in inequality that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of log earnings among individuals into the part due to changes in earnings among establishments and the part due to changes in earnings within-establishments and finds that much of the 1970s-2010s increase in earnings inequality results from increased dispersion of the earnings among the establishments where individuals work. It also shows that the divergence of establishment earnings occurred within and across industries and was associated with increased variance of revenues per worker. Our results direct attention to the fundamental role of establishment-level pay setting and economic adjustments in earnings inequality.

This study examines the ethnic identity of authors in over 2.5 million scientific papers written by US-based authors from 1985 to 2008, a period in which the frequency of English and European names among authors fell relative to the frequency of names from China and other developing countries. We find that persons of similar ethnicity co-author together more frequently than predicted by their proportion among authors.Using a measure of homophily for individual papers, we find that greater homophily is associated with publication in lower impact journals and with fewer citations, even holding fixed the authors' previous publishing performance. By contrast, papers with authors in more locations and with longer reference lists get published in higher impact journals and receive more citations than others. These findings suggest that diversity in inputs by author ethnicity, location, and references leads to greater contributions to science as measured by impact factors and citations.

This paper links data on establishments and individuals to analyze the role of establishments in the increase in inequality that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of 1n earnings among individuals into the part due to changes in earnings among establishments and the part due to changes in earnings within-establishments and finds that much of the 1970s-2010s increase in earnings inequality results from increased dispersion of the earnings among the establishments where individuals work. It also shows that the divergence of establishment earnings occurred within and across industries and was associated with increased variance of revenues per worker. Our results direct attention to the fundamental role of establishment-level pay setting and economic adjustments in earnings inequality.

This paper examines international and domestic collaborations using data from an original survey of corresponding authors and Web of Science data of articles that had at least one US coauthor in the fields of Particle and Field Physics, Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, and Biotechnology and Applied Microbiology. The data allow us to investigate the connections among coauthors and the views of corresponding authors about the collaboration. We have four main findings. First, we find that US collaborations have increased across US cities as well as across international borders, with the nature of collaborations across cities resembling that across countries. Second, face-to-face meetings are important in collaborations: most collaborators first met working in the same institution and communicate often through meetings with coauthors from distant locations. Third, the main reason for most collaborations is to combine the specialized knowledge and skills of coauthors, but there are substantial differences in the mode of collaborations between small lab-based science and big science, where international collaborations are more prevalent. Fourth, for biotech, we find that citations to international papers are higher compared to papers with domestic collaborators only, but not for the other two fields. Moreover, in all three fields, papers with the same number of coauthors had lower citations if they were international collaborations. Overall, our findings suggest that all collaborations are best viewed from a framework of collaborations across space broadly, rather than in terms of international as opposed to domestic collaborative activity.

This paper seeks to explain the greater hours worked by Americans compared to Germans in terms of forward-looking labor supply responses to differences in earnings inequality between the countries. We argue that workers choose current hours of work to gain promotions and advance in the distribution of earnings. Since US earnings are more unequally distributed than German earnings, the same extra work pays off more in the US, generating more hours worked. Supporting this inequality–hours hypothesis, we show that in both countries hours worked is positively related to earnings inequality in cross-section occupational contrasts and that hours worked raises future wages and promotion prospects in longitudinal data.

Summary The most popular explanation for greater job creation in the US than in Germany is that greater dispersion of wages coupled with less regulations governing the labour market and the product market in the US has induced firms to employ many less skilled workers. While popular, these explanations turn out to be difficult to prove empirically. Based on the Comparative German American Structural Database and the International Adult Literacy Survey we find that: 1. Employment rates differ more than unemployment rates by skill levels and overall. 2. German and US relative pay by level of skill was similar in 1970 but diverged in the 1980s. 3. The German work force is more skilled than the US work force especially at the lower skill levels. 4. The employment of skilled to unskilled labour within industries is unrelated to country differences in skill premium but changes in relatives wages are related to changes in relative employment. 5. The differing dispersion of wages is not a major contributor to differences in employment rates between Germany and the US. The jobs problem in Germany is not primarily one of relative labor demand but of demand for labor in general.

Crime and legal work are not mutually exclusive choices but represent a continuum of legal and illegal income-generating activities. The links between crime and legal work involve trade-offs among crime returns, punishment costs, legal work opportunity costs, and tastes and preferences regarding both types of work. Rising crime rates in the 1980s in the face of rising incarceration rates suggest that the threat of punishment is not the dominant cost of crime. Crime rates are inversely related to expected legal wages, particularly among young males with limited job skills or prospects. Recent ethnographic research shows that involvement in illegal work often is motivated by low wages and harsh conditions in legal work. Many criminal offenders "double up" in both legal work and crime, either concurrently or sequentially. This overlap suggests a fluid and dynamic interaction between legal and illegal work. Market wages and job opportunities interact with social and legal pressures to influence decisions to abandon crime for legal work. Explanations of the patterns of legal and illegal work should be informed by econometric, social structural, and labeling theories. The continuity of legal and illegal work suggests the importance of illegal wages in research and theory on criminal decision making. Language: en

Обсуждается вопрос о поисках наилучшей модели рынка труда. Анализируется как на самом деле функционируют институты рынка труда, влияют ли эти институты (нормы и правила) на результаты труда; как соотносятся между собой различные, ныне существующие модели устройства рынка труда (для анализа предложено 11 характеристик, связанных с определенными институтами).

This paper directs attention at the globalization of knowledge and knowledge creation as the fundamental global driver of economic outcomes in today's information economy. It documents the globalization of knowledge and spread of scientific research from advanced to developing countries and argues that these developments undermine trade models in which advanced countries invariably have comparative advantage in high tech goods and services; determine the immigration of skilled workers; boosts labor standards; and influences incomes and inequality within and across countries. To the extent that knowledge is the key component in productivity and growth, its spread and creation is the one ring of globalization that rules the more widely studied patterns of trade, capital flows and immigration, per my title.

China's new Labour Contract Law took effect in January 2008 and required firms to give migrant workers written contracts, strengthened labour protections for workers and contained penalties for firms that did not follow the labour code. This article uses survey data of migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta before and after the law, and a retrospective question on when workers received their first labour contract to assess the effects of the law on labour outcomes. The evidence shows that the new law increased the percentage of migrant workers with written contracts, which in turn raised social insurance coverage, reduced the likelihood of wage arrears and raised the likelihood that workers had a union at their workplace.

This paper explores the link between employee perceptions of working conditions and the desire for worker representation in Britain and the US. We find that the distribution of employee perceptions of poor working conditions is similar in Britain and the US; similar factors affect the number of perceived poor working conditions; and the perception of poor working conditions is strongly associated with the desire for union representation. The nature of workplaces, as opposed to employees’ characteristics, is the predominant factor determining employee perceptions of poor working conditions.

This article takes a critical look at the view that wage flexibility, US-style, is the panacea to European unemployment problems. It shows that the wage flexibility in the US in the 1980s-1990s was associated with rising inequality and falling real wages for many workers, reduced rather than increased employment for the low-paid and less-skilled, whose wages fell, and arguably contributed to the growth of a significant criminal population. The proportion of American men incarcerated comes close to the proportion of European men long-term unemployed. The limits to wage flexibility in curing unemployment noted in the paper does not mean the reductions in pay may not, under some circumstances, raise employment, but rather that by themselves massive pay cuts for the low-paid are no cure to economic problems. Copyright 1995 by Oxford University Press.

Looks at the role of the minimum in wage setting and how it differs among countries and over time. Discusses the differing attributes of minimum wages and their pluses and minuses.

The U.S. experience with immigration from poor countries is examined using the results of two projects carried out by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Questions considered include what determines the supply of immigrants how such immigrants fare in the U.S. job market and how this immigration affects the prospects of native-born workers. (ANNOTATION)