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To investigate whether significant differences exist in job satisfaction (JS) between individuals receiving performance‐related pay (PRP) and those on alternative compensation plans.

Using data from four waves (1998‐2001) of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), a Heckman‐type econometric procedure is applied that corrects for both self‐selection of individuals into their preferred compensation scheme and the endogeneity of wages in a JS framework.

It is found that while the predicted JS of workers receiving PRP is lower on average compared to those on other pay schemes, PRP exerts a positive effect on the mean JS of (very) high‐paid workers. A potential explanation for this pattern could be that for lower‐paid employees PRP is perceived to be controlling, whereas higher‐paid workers derive a utility benefit from what they view as supportive reward schemes.

As the study utilises data from the UK only, its results cannot be generalized to other countries characterized by distinct labour market contexts. Furthermore, the quality of the estimates depends on the quality of the identifying restrictions which, in these types of studies, are always somewhat ad hoc. However, the available tests for evaluating the quality of the identifying restrictions indicated that they are appropriate for the models used.

The findings of the paper suggest that using performance pay as an incentive device in the UK could prove to be counterproductive in the long run for certain low‐paid occupations, as far as employee JS is concerned.

This paper is the first to have attempted to correct for the selectivity issue when considering the effect of PRP on JS. Its implications should be of interest to human resource managers when designing the compensation strategies of their organizations.

This paper investigates the relationship between tenure and earnings using two different approaches utilising a matched employer‐employee sample. In the first approach a two step procedure is adopted where the tenure status is modelled as endogenous and subject to choice decision. In the second approach the effect of tenure on earnings is estimated by a system of simultaneous equations using three stage least squares. The results suggest the tenure is a significant determinant of earnings.

Although the link between socioeconomic deprivation and health status has been identified by many researchers, not much attention has been paid to the intergenerational effect of poverty on physical and psychological health status. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of childhood deprivation on health at the later stages of the working age.

Data for individuals aged between 50 and 65 in six European countries are collected using purpose build questionnaires. The dataset provides information on issues such as physical and mental health status, past working experiences, socioeconomic and occupational background, incidence of diseases and sense of well‐being. Ordinary least squares (OLS) and ordered logit models are utilised to estimate the effect of childhood deprivation on health status indices. Logit models are also used to investigate the effects of childhood deprivation on the likelihood of an individual suffering from specific disease.

There is a consistent and significant negative effect of childhood deprivation on the overall health profile at later adulthood. For instance, for each additional unit of the childhood deprivation index, the index of the mobility status and physical health status in later adulthood decrease by 0.19 and 0.28, respectively, the index of the psychological health decrease by almost 0.41 and the odds of exhibiting better self‐assessed health decrease by a factor of 0.86 (all p‐values are <0.01). Similar negative effects of childhood deprivation on the likelihood of an individual suffering from a specific medical condition are unearthed.

It is shown that childhood socioeconomic deprivation has long lasting detrimental effects on the health of individuals that are observable at the later ages of working life. Hence, the relationship between childhood socioeconomic deprivation and adult health should be an important factor in social policy and health care planning in an era of aging populations.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate low-wage retention using a survival analysis approach.

Variables explaining low-wage retention take into account the characteristics of the employee, such as education, age, tenure with the company, gender and nationality, and the characteristics of the job and the company such as industry affiliation, number of employees, age of the company and location.

Female workers and workers with low level of education, older ones, those with more seniority in the company and those of Asian origin remain longer in a low-wage situation. Also, workers in smaller and older companies located outside the Lisbon region are more likely to stay in a low-wage situation.

The policy implications are clear. Education plays a prominent role: the higher the level of education of the individual, the higher the probability of him/her leaving low pay. Training programs may help employees in Portugal to leave the low-wage situation. Furthermore, policies must address the different mobility rates of different nationalities and different activities. Training programs are more urgent for hotels and restaurants and transports and communication. The findings also indicate that those initially working in younger firms and larger firms have a higher probability of leaving the low-wage situation. This is a stimulus for decision makers to stimulate employment in the younger firms or in the larger firms.

Despite low-wage retention being a well-known field of research, to our knowledge this is the first research paper using survival analysis to explain the duration of a low-wage situation.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on transitions from the state of unemployment to that of employment and of inactivity in Italy and Spain.

First, the paper investigates the determinants of unemployment outflows in these two Mediterranean labour markets. Then, the paper examines discrepancies and similarities between specific outflow determinants, especially the interactions between gender and marital status, by comparing results obtained across countries.

The findings of the paper suggest that gender and marital status influence the probability of unemployment outflows in both countries, although not in the same way, especially with reference to marital status. Discrepancies also emerge in relation to the role of geographical area of residence.

International comparisons of unemployment outflows are rather new in the literature, and as far as we know none have been performed using European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data. Further, although studies quite often examine the issue of gender-related labour mobility using the European Community Household Panel survey that took place in the 1990s (Arulampalam et al., 2007; Garcia Pérez and Rebollo Sanz, 2005; Theodossiou and Zangelidis, 2009), one of the main contributions of this paper is that it provides a systematic examination of the issue, considering the influence of gender and marital status differences on patterns of unemployment outflows to employment and inactivity.

The purpose of this paper is to enhance understanding low pay dynamics of Australian employees, with a focus on the determination of low pay duration.

The study draws on a representative longitudinal survey of Australian households to provide empirical findings from both descriptive analysis and econometric modelling.

The results show that workers who have entered low pay from higher pay also have a higher hazard rate of transitioning to higher pay; and those who have entered low pay from non-employment are more likely to return to non-employment. Union members, public sector jobs and working in medium to large size firms tend to increase the hazard rate of transitioning to higher pay, while immigrants from non-English speaking countries and workers with health problems have a lower hazard rate of moving into higher pay. There is some evidence that the longer a worker is on low pay, the less likely he or she is to transition to higher pay.

This study addresses an information gap regarding the determination of low pay duration. The findings help identify workers who are at high risk of staying on low pay or transitioning into non-employment and are therefore informative for developing targeted policy to help the low paid maintain employment and/or move up the earnings ladder. The results also suggest that policy intervention should take place at an early stage of a low pay spell.

Tests for the existence of a long‐run relationship between real wages and employment, utilising annual data from 1961‐1996 for a panel of 12 European Union countries.

Applies modern time series techniques organised around panel unit root and panel cointegration tests to draw sharper conclusions from the short time series that are typically available.

Indicates that a long‐run relationship between real wages and employment cannot be established. This being so, little success is expected in bringing down unemployment, the most pressing problem in the European Union, by reducing real wages.

Investigates the long‐run relationship between real wages and employment by conducting more reliable tests in the context of 12 European countries, namely Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Portugal, the UK, Norway and Finland over the period 1961‐1996.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of national unemployment rates on overall age and cause‐specific mortality rates in a panel sample of 13 European Union countries.

A fixed‐effects model is used to control for unobserved time‐invariant characteristics within countries. In addition, controls such as lifestyle risk factors, urbanisation and medical intervention indicators, for potential confounders are used.

Contrary to some recent evidence this study shows that there is a strong, positive relationship between adverse economic conditions and mortality. This is in contrast to findings about the US case.

This paper revisits the issue of the unemployment‐mortality relationship by utilising fixed effect models with controls for various indicators that are expected to affect mortality, in contrast to previous studies.

Currently, a much-debated issue concerns the social and political significance of the emergence of the precariat, a social class consisting of people for whom uncertainty and unpredictability of life circumstances and employment relations make it impossible to plan for the future, forcing them to live on a day-to-day basis (Standing, 2011). However, it remains unclear how the precariat may be defined and operationalized. On the one hand, treating non-standard employment arrangements (fixed-term contracts, temporary agency work, etc.) as a basis for identifying precarious jobs is likely to be misleading, as research has shown non-standard employment to be heterogeneous with respect to working conditions and chances for achieving stabilization. On the other hand, subjective perceptions of security may also be misleading as indicators of precarity, as they are compounded by psychological coping mechanisms and perceptions of reference group status. This analysis attempts to disentangle the complex relationships between non-standard employment and perceived insecurity in order to provide grounds for a more adequate conceptualization and measurement of job precarity. Specifically, I assess the extent to which the relationship between worker contractual status and perceived job, labor market, and employment insecurity is conditional on various characteristics of workers, their jobs, and their households, taking into account the country-level economic and institutional context. The analysis is based on multi-level regression models using data from the 2010 European Working Conditions Survey.

This study examines the effect of public debt on the economic growth of OECD countries by disentangling the effect into permanent and transitory components. The study covers 37 OECD countries.

The Mundlak decomposition was employed to decompose the effect of public debt into its transitory and permanent effect on economic growth. To account for potential endogeneity problem, the Hausman and Taylor estimator was employed to estimate the decomposed model. Further, the study disaggregated the OECD model into country group models for further analysis of the dynamics of the relationship between the variables.

The findings of the study reveal that in the full OECD model public debt exerts a significant negative permanent and positive transitory effect on economic growth. This was robust to alternative model specifications. The magnitude of the negative permanent effect of debt was found to be larger than the positive transitory effect. Further, the estimates of the disaggregated models reveal that though public debt has a negative permanent effect across all the country groups, it was not the case for the transitory effect of debt. Also, a net public debt model was estimated, and its effect on public debt was found to be largely insignificant, exhibiting a Ricardian-like behaviour.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study, particularly in the OECD context that employed the Mundlak transformation to examine the permanent versus transitory effect of public debt on economic growth.