Unionised employees' influence on executive compensation: Evidence from Korea

This is the final version. Available on open access from Wiley via the DOI in this recordThis paper explores the relationship between executive compensation and employee voiceusing a panel dataset from Korean firms. It was found that the existence and rate of labour unionisation are both negatively associated with executive compensation payment, and that the negative association is progressively stronger for upper percentile executive pay. Labour union existence also has a strong negative correlation with stock option use in executive compensation packages, but unionisation rate does not, implying that union existence is more critical in shaping executive compensation structures than the strength of the union. Membership of large family-owned business conglomerates (chaebol), high financial risk, and high employee wages are identified as channels that reinforce the negative influence of labour unions on executive compensation

Don't tax me? : Determinants of individual attitudes toward progressive taxation

This contribution empirically analyses the individual determinants of tax rate preferences. For that purpose we make use of the representative German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) that offers data on the individual attitudes toward progressive, proportional, and regressive taxation. Our theoretical considerations suggest that beyond self-interest, information, fairness considerations, economic beliefs and several other individual factors drive individual preferences for tax rate structures. Our empirical results indicate that the self-interest view does not offer the sole explanation for the heterogeneity in attitudes toward progressive taxation. Rather, we show that the choice of the favoured tax rate is also driven by fairness considerations

Wages and Contracting Out: Does the Law of One Price Hold?

We find that, conditioning on industry of assignment, cleaners and security guards who participate in activities organized by contract companies earn 15 and 17 per cent less, respectively, than workers in those activities organized in-house. These estimates are hardly affected by the inclusion of a set of jointly statistically significant exogenous variables. We can expect that most of the productive traits that characterize a task are transferred to the contractor in the process of contracting out a cleaning or security task. Thus, our findings are hard to rationalize by a simple competitive labour market setting where the law of one price holds. Copyright (c) Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2007.