Search

This paper examines the gender composition of the flow of new hirees along the organizational hierarchy of jobs. We find that women have a reduced chance to be hired at higher hierarchical levels. We refer to this phenomenon as the glass door. The glass door consists of an absolute and a relative effect. First, there is a reduced probability of women being recruited for jobs at higher hierarchical levels. Second, a larger fraction of jobs below the focal level of hiring within the firm reduces the relative inflow of female hirees. The latter component leads women moving to firms in which the job has a lower relative position in the hierarchical structure. We explain the glass door phenomenon by a theoretical model of the firm's decision to hire a woman. The model is based on two key assumptions. First, women have a higher probability of leaving due to their higher valuation of non-market activities. Second, a voluntary quit leads to a larger decrease in the production of lower level co-workers when the worker who leaves has a position in the upper tier of the hierarchy. The glass door implies that the value of women's outside option in the labor market is lower. It may provide an additional explanation of why a glass ceiling can be sustainable as an equilibrium phenomenon.

This paper tests empirically for ex-post moral hazard in a system based on demand-side subsidies. In the Netherlands, demand-side subsidies were introduced in 1996. Clients receive a cash benefit to purchase the type of home care (housework, personal care, support with mobility, organisational tasks or social support) they need from the care supplier of their choice (private care provider, regular care agency, commercial care agency or paid informal care provider). Furthermore, they negotiate with the care supplier about price and quantity. Our main findings are the following. 1) The component of the cash benefit a client has no residual claimant on, has a positive impact on the price of care. 2) In contrast, the components of the cash benefit a client has residual claimant on, have no or a negative impact on the price of care. Both results point at the existence of ex-post moral hazard in a system of demand-side subsidies.

Part-time employment has become an extremely popular work arrangement in the Netherlands because it renders employment compatible with non-work activities. We posit that there may be a downside to part-time employment, which is related to its negative effects on workers? career. This may be the case when firms use promotions to stimulate skill acquisition and human capital accumulation or when they base their work incentive schemes on performance measures that are affected by the number of hours worked or when they screen workers on the basis of the number of hours worked. Because promotions are an important source of wage growth, the low incidence of promotion among part-time workers may contribute to the emergence of the part-time wage penalty (i.e., the wage difference between a part-time worker and an otherwise equal full-time worker) in due time. Consistent with this view, we find that (male and female) workers in part-time jobs are characterized by a lower incidence of promotion relative to workers in full-time jobs and that promotions account for a wage growth of eight log points. Moreover, we find that the part-time wage penalty does not arise at the onset of a career as young workers join the labor market but that it tends to develop over time as labor market experience and the effect of missed promotions cumulate.

This paper investigates the effectiveness of a monthly lottery in reducing sick leave among workers in a manufacturing firm. Conditions of participation are not having reported sick in the previous three months and not having won the lottery earlier. It turns out that the lottery results in a decrease in the rate of sick leave of 1.6 percentage point. From the perspective of the firm, the lottery is found to be highly beneficial that is, the benefits associated with the decrease in the sick leave rate exceed the costs of the lottery. Workers seem to be primarily driven by the first upcoming lottery. After winning the lottery, winners resume their previous (rate of) absence.

This paper investigates price-setting for truly homogenous products sold in markets without any formal trade barriers. We use data from IKEA, a furniture company selling identical products in an identical shopping environment in different EU countries. We get four remarkable outcomes: 1) The law of one price does not hold. 2) Country-specific effects of non-tradable cost components are important. 3) Pricing to the market surely occurs but price discrimination is limited by incomplete information. 4) The unexplained part of betweencountry price variation for identical products is about 75% which leaves most of the intercountry price variation unexplained.

We present an organized set of stylized facts on the relations among flows of workers,changes in employment and changes in the numer of jobs at the firm level. Job turnover isusually measured by comparing stocks of employment in each firm at two points in time andadding up the absolute employment changes. This measure is a just proxy for true jobturnover because only net job changes are counted. In this paper we use information thatallows us to compare this proxy with the correct measure. We compare both of thesemeasures to a measure of labor turnover that counts movements of individuals into and outof jobs. We find that: 1) The proxy for job turnover does not differ substantially from actualjob turnover; 2) There is a big difference between job turnover and labor turnover. Mostmobility is into and out of existing jobs rather than to created or from destroyed jobs; 3) Alarge fraction of all hires are by firms where employment is declining, and a large fractionof all layoffs are by firms where employment is expanding; 4) Simultaneous hiring and firingis due to heterogeneity of the work force.