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We evaluate potential determinants of enrollment in an early retirement incentive program for non-tenure-track employees at a large university. Using administrative records on the eligible population of employees not covered by collective bargaining agreements, historical employee count and layoff data by budget units, and public information on unit budgets, we find dips in per-employee finances in a budget unit during the application year, and higher recent per employee layoffs were associated with increased probabilities of eligible employee program enrollment. Our results also suggest that, on average, employees whose salaries are lower than we would predict given their personal characteristics and job titles were more likely to enroll in the early retirement program. To the extent that employees’ compensation reflect their productivity, as it should under a pay system in which annual salary increases are based on merit, this finding suggests that adverse selection was not a problem with the program. That is, we find no evidence that on average the “most productive” employees took the incentive.

Pay varies across individuals. Some variation is endemic to a country's institutions including a country's level of development and its technological infrastructure. Some variation is based on differences in individual attributes, particularly an individual's ability to acquire human capital. Finally, some variation is based on incentives instigated by the government, by one's employer, or by one's family. These incentives often operate indirectly by influencing educational choices, labor force participation, and even cohabitation and marital arrangements. This volume contains eight articles on aspects of the distribution of income. One deals with technology change and the distribution of earnings, two deal with internal labor markets, four deal with incentives that motivate work related behavior, and finally one deals with immigrant labor market success.

The aim of this paper is to analyze responses of public universities to the introduction of New Public Management (NPM) as the outcome of balancing between the managerial logics endorsed by NPM and the academic professional logics. Building on the institutional logics approach, we develop a framework concerning how universities will achieve compliance to conflicting claims by strategies like compartmentalization and blending stipulations of both logics. Empirical results based on a large-scale survey of 26 universities in eight European countries display how compatibility is achieved through highly differentiated adoption of logics that depends on the task considered. The results reveal that the strength of NPM pressures strongly affects the adoption of managerial practices within universities yet has no significant effect on the academic characteristics.

Popular accounts of the labor movement suggest that unions have become weak organizations. There are, however, trends that indicate laborʼs political power has not waned in recent years. Using data from multiple sources, the results in this study indicate: (1) despite declines in union density, the percentage of union households has remained steady for two decades; (2) unions continue to produce a strong Democratic vote from its membership, even from its white male members; (3) unions are among the top campaign contributors and spenders in American elections; (4) unions hold significant influence among congressional Democrats and have made gains at the state and local level; and (5) public opinion of labor unions has remained consistently positive for several decades.

Game-based learning or simulation-based learning – especially Serious Games – are notions of the contemporary discourse on digitalisation in the higher education sector in Germany. These methods offer a more vivid and motivating learning context and they help to improve important competencies for reaching work-related higher education goals. This explorative study focuses on experts’ experiences with digital and non-digital serious games and their contribution towards developing self, social and management competencies, in the Bundeswehr Command and Staff College in Hamburg (Germany). Whilst there are numerous opportunities for using serious games in higher education, their use creates barriers for addressing social, as well as leadership/management competencies. In the future, game-based learning – and more specifically, digital game-based learning – could challenge the relation between learning as hard work and learn for fun, and between explicit and goal-oriented learning and implicit, incidental and explorative learning.

This chapter considers the provocative yet unexplored idea that a relationship exists between the nature by which a union wins recognition from an employer and the collective bargaining outcomes that are produced. Since at least the Ronald Reagan Administration, many trade, service and industrial unions in the United States have deployed alterative means to win recognition. Unions have negotiated a host of neutrality and card-check agreements as alternatives to petitioning for elections under the auspices of the National Labor Relations Board. The use of these diverse organizing mechanisms has been well documented by numerous authors writing in the “union revitalization” genre, but what has not been done is the evaluation of the bargaining outcomes – effects – of different organizing tactics. The critical questions that have not been answered until now are, “What difference does it make how a union wins recognition?” Are the fortunes of newly organized union workers influenced by the way that they are brought into the labor movement? Based on a ten-year review of several successful union organizing cases, the findings from this chapter suggest that the key variable in gaining certification and ultimately a first contract is the ability of the union to leverage power and to do so in a timely manner.