A substantial literature over the past thirty years has evaluated tradeoffs between money and fatality risks. These values in turn serve as estimates of the value of a statistical life. This article reviews more than 60 studies of mortality risk premiums from ten countries and approximately 40 studies that present estimates of injury risk premiums. This critical review examines a variety of econometric issues, the role of unionization in risk premiums, and the effects of age on the value of a statistical life. Our meta-analysis indicates an income elasticity of the value of a statistical life from about 0.5 to 0.6. The paper also presents a detailed discussion of policy applications of these value of a statistical life estimates and related issues, including risk-risk analysis.

We examine whether men and women of the same ability differ in their selection into a competitive environment. Participants in a laboratory experiment solve a real task, first under a non-competitive piece rate and then a competitive tournament incentive scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance, men select the tournament twice as much as women when choosing their compensation scheme for the next performance. While seventy-three percent of the men select the tournament only thirty-five percent of the women make this choice. This gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance and factors such as risk and feedback aversion only play a negligible role. Instead the tournament-entry gap is driven by men being more overconfident and by gender differences in preferences for performing in a competition. The result is that women shy away from competition and men embrace it. * We thank Scott Kinross, who conducted all the experiments reported in this paper, for his excellent research assistance. We thank the editors and the referees who helped us improve the paper. We also

This paper identifies and evaluates rationales for team participation and for the effects of team composition on productivity using novel data from a garment plant that shifted from individual piece rate to group piece rate production over three years. The adoption of teams at the plant improved worker productivity by 14 % on average. Productivity improvement was greatest for the earliest teams and diminished as more workers engaged in team production, providing support for the view that teams utilize collaborative skills, which are less valuable in individual production. High productivity workers tended to join teams first, despite a loss in earnings in many cases, suggesting non-pecuniary benefits associated with teamwork. Finally, more heterogeneous teams were more productive, holding average ability constant, which is consistent with explanations emphasizing mutual team learning and intra-team bargaining.

This paper provides a critical review of the empirical literature on the relationship between health insurance, labor supply, and job mobility. We review over 50 papers on this topic, almost exclusively written in the last 10 years. We reach five conclusions. First, there is clear and unambiguous evidence that health insurance is a central determinant of retirement decisions. Second, there is fairly clear evidence that health insurance is not a major determinant of the labor supply and welfare exit decisions of low income mothers. Third, there is fairly compelling evidence that health insurance is an important factor in the labor supply decisions of secondary earners. Fourth, while there is some division in the literature, the most convincing evidence suggests that health insurance plays an important role in job mobility decisions. Finally, there is virtually no evidence in the literature on the welfare implications of these results. We present some rudimentary calculations which suggest that the welfare costs of job lock are likely to be modest. Our general conclusion is that health insurance has important

Abstract —In spite of the large and growing importance of the employer size-wage premium, previous attempts to account for this premium using observable worker or employer characteristic s have had limited success. The problem is that, while most theoretical explanation s for the size-wage premium are based on the matching of employers and employees, previous empirical work has relied on either worker surveys with little information about the employer, or establishmen t surveys with little information about the workers. In contrast, this study uses the newly created Worker-Establishment Characteristic Database, which contains linked employeremployee data for a large sample of U.S. manufacturing workers and establishments, to examine seven explanation s for the employer size-wage premium. A number of the explanation s can account for some of the observed cross-sectiona l variation in worker wages. However, none of the explanations can fully account for the employer size-wage premium. In the end there remains a large, signi � cant, and unexplained premium paid to workers of large employers. I.

Competitive high ranking positions are largely occupied by men, and women remain scarce in engineering and sciences. Explanations for these occupational differences focus on discrimination and preferences for work hours and field of study. We explore an additional explanation, namely that women and men may differ in their selection into competitive environments. Men and women in a laboratory experiment perform a real task under a non-competitive piece rate and a competitive tournament scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance under either of these compensations, there is a substantial gender difference when participants subsequently choose the scheme they want to apply to their next performance. Twice as many men as women choose the tournament over the piece rate. This gender gap in tournament entry is neither explained by performance before nor after the entry decision. Furthermore, while men are more optimistic about their relative performance, differences in beliefs only explain a small share of the gap in tournament entry. In a final task, we find that women are less likely to select tournament compensations even when they select it for past performance. In predicting tournament entry we use the compensation choice for past performance as a control for non-tournament specific gender differences (such as risk aversion, general feedback aversion and overconfidence), and we find a large residual gender effect.

Workers with difficult working conditions can be expected to be compensated by higher wages. They may, for example, choose shift work because of compensating wages but it is also possible that they prefer shift work. The previous empirical evidence is mixed. We study if there are compensating wages for shift work by estimating a switching regression model with endogenous switching using French matched employer–employee data for male full time blue collar workers. It is crucial to adjust for selectivity and not to pool data for shift and day workers. A main result is that there is a significant shift premium, the wage rate for shift workers is 16 percent higher than for day workers. A second main result is that the shift premium is significant for shift work choice. This premium compensates workers who do not self–select into shift work. A 1 percentage point increase in the premium increases the shift work probability by 0.87 percentage points.

Abstract: Psychologists have developed effective survey methods of measuring how happy people feel at a given time. The relationship between how happy a person feels and utility is an unresolved question. Existing work in Economics either ignores happiness data or assumes that felt happiness is more or less the same thing as flow utility. The approach we propose in this paper steers a middle course between the two polar views that “happiness is irrelevant to Economics ” and the view that “happiness is a sufficient statistic for utility.” We argue that felt happiness is not the same thing as flow utility, but that it does have a systematic relationship to utility. In particular, we propose that happiness is the sum of two components: (1) elation--or short-run happiness--which depends on recent news about lifetime utility and (2) baseline mood--or long-run happiness--which is a subutility function much like health, entertainment, or nutrition. In principle, all of the usual techniques of price theory apply to baseline mood, but the application of those techniques is complicated by the fact that many people may not know the true household production function for baseline mood. If this theory is on target, there are two reasons data on felt happiness is important for Economics. First, short-run happiness in response to news can give important information about

for under contract number SBAHQ-05-Q-0012 Release Date: July 2007 The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations found in this study are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Office of Advocacy, the United States Small Business Administration, or the United States government. July 2007 No. 308

This Discussion Paper is issued within the framework of IZA’s research area General Labor Economics. Any opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and not those of the institute. Research disseminated by IZA may include views on policy, but the institute itself takes no institutional policy positions. The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn is a local and virtual international research center and a place of communication between science, politics and business. IZA is an independent, nonprofit limited liability company (Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung) supported by the Deutsche Post AG. The center is associated with the University of Bonn and offers a stimulating research environment through its research networks, research support, and visitors and doctoral programs. IZA engages in (i) original and internationally competitive research in all fields of labor economics, (ii) development of policy concepts, and (iii) dissemination of research results and concepts to the interested public. The current research program deals with (1) mobility and flexibility of labor markets, (2) internationalization of labor markets and European integration, (3) the welfare state and labor markets, (4) labor markets in transition, (5) the future of work, (6) project evaluation and (7) general labor economics. IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character. IZA Discussion Paper No. 69