Jaime Ortega

An exploration of the factors that influence employee participation in Europe

The goal of this study was to identify the determinants of direct employee participation in organizations across Europe. Some factors were predicted to be related to levels of participation in general, namely, competition, sector, the pursuit of a differentiation strategy based on either quality or service, and indirect participation. Two additional factors were expected to be differentially related to two forms of direct participation: consultation and delegation. These factors were organizational size and the pursuit of a cost leadership business strategy. The hypothesized relationships were contrasted using data from the EPOC survey, a representative survey of over 5,700 organizations located in 10 European Union countries. The results supported 11 of the 14 predicted relationships.

Why do Employers Give Discretion? Family Versus Performance Concerns

Using a large data set of Western European employees, I examine two sets of reasons behind employers decisions to give discretion: performance concerns (firms give discretion in order to improve performance) and family concerns (firms wish to improve the employees workfamily balance). I find more support for the former than for the latter. Discretion is positively related to the use of high-performance work practices and to employee position and ability, and is smaller in larger establishments, which suggests that loss of control matters to employers. Evidence about family concerns is less compelling. Female participation in the labor force has a positive effect on discretion over work schedules, but women have less discretion than men, and employees with small children do not have more discretion than other employees. Large and governmental organizations, which are expected to care more about workfamily balance, do not offer more discretion over work schedules than other types of organizations.

Generic Simplicity of the Spectrum and Stabilization for a Plate Equation

In this work we prove the generic simplicity of the spectrum of the clamped plate equation in a bounded regular domain of

Addendum to Generic Simplicity of the Spectrum and Stabilization for a Plate Equation

{\mathbb R}^d.

Employee Discretion and the Labor-Market Environment

That is, given

Job Rotation as a Learning Mechanism

\Omega\subset{\mathbb R}^d,

The Adoption of Job Rotation: Testing the Theories

we show that there exists an arbitrarily small deformation of the domain

Power in the Firm and Managerial Career Concerns

u,

Performance Pay and the "Time Squeeze"

such that all the eigenvalues of the plate system in the deformed domain

Employee Discretion and Performance Pay

\Omega +u