Over the past 3 decades, the U.S. Temporary Help Services (THS) industry grew five times more rapidly than overall employment. Contemporaneously, courts in 46 states adopted exceptions to the common law doctrine of employment at will that limited employers' discretion to terminate workers and opened them to litigation. This article assesses the contribution of "unjust dismissal" doctrine to THS employment specifically, and outsourcing more generally, finding that it is substantialexplaining 20% of the growth of THS between 1973 and 1995 and contributing 500,000 additional outsourced workers in 2000. States with smaller declines in unionization also saw substantially more THS growth.

In this article, I provide both econometric and case study evidence on the labor market effects of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1985 Garcia v. San Antonio Metropolitan Transit Authority decision that made 80% of state and local government workers eligible to receive compensation for overtime hours worked. Empirical evidence suggests that the behavior of public sector workers is consistent with a Coasian model in which overtime provisions are explicitly bargained for by the parties involved, likely making overtime legislation an ineffective tool for influencing the amount of overtime hours worked by public sector employees.

Using an arbitrage approach,

This article uses variation in the labor supply of twelfth‐grade students created by interstate variations in child labor laws to estimate the effect of school‐year work on twelfth‐grade math achievement. The instrumental variable estimates in this article indicate that an exogenous decrease in school‐year hours worked of 10 hours per week would result in a 0.2 standard deviation increase in math scores. Comparisons to ordinary least squares estimates suggest that failure to account for the endogeneity of the labor supply decisions of high school students will result in underestimates of the negative impact of school‐year work on academic achievement.

Reload options, call options granting new options on exercise, are popularly used in compensation. Although the compound option feature may seem complicated, there is a distribution-free dominant policy of exercising reload options whenever they are in the money. The optimal policy implies general formulas for numerical valuation. Simpler formulas for valuation and hedging follow from Black–Scholes assumptions with or without continuous dividends. Time vesting affects the optimal policy, but numerical results indicate that it is nearly optimal to exercise in the money whenever feasible. The results suggest that reload options produce similar incentives as employee stock options and share grants.

After controlling for loan quality, liquidity, capitalization, and output mix, per unit bank operating costs are found to vary significantly across Asian countries and over time. Further analysis reveals that the country rankings of per unit labor and physical capital costs are highly correlated, suggesting that there exist systematic differences in bank operating efficiency across Asian countries. However, this measure of operating efficiency is found to be unrelated to the degree of openness of the banking sector. Asian bank operating costs were found to decline from 1992 to 1997, indicating that banks were improving their operating performance over time. Since 1997, the run-up in operating costs coincided with the Asian financial crisis, suggesting that banks were incurring additional costs in dealing with their problem loans while output was declining simultaneously. Moreover, the labor cost share is found to decline significantly between 1997 and 1999, indicating that banks were able to cut their labor force after the financial crisis but were less flexible to reduce physical capital input. Furthermore, significant differences in labor cost share are detected across countries, suggesting that different countries have different bank production functions. The variations in labor cost share are significantly positively related to the country’s financial services wage rate, suggesting that banks using relatively more labor in a particular country is due to the labor force productivity, rather than labor being cheap.

This paper examines the effects of a series of events leading up to the deregulation of deposit interest rates in Hong Kong on the market value of banks. All the evidence suggests that banks earned rents from deposit interest rate rules (IRRs) and deregulation would lower these rents and hence bank market values. On average, the total abnormal return due to interest rates deregulation was around negative 4%. There is some evidence that large banks and banks with high deposit-to-asset ratio suffered a bigger drop in value, suggesting that these banks enjoyed a bigger subsidy under the IRRs.