Corporate restructuring--strategic planning and redesign of employee benefits

Many intricate legal, actuarial, design and fiduciary issues arise during corporate restructuring. It is critical to create a process approach that clearly defines and evaluates the human resource and benefits issues that are involved, giving consideration to legal and regulatory, operational, administrative, financial and labor-related concerns.     

How work environment impacts retention

Work environment is a major aspect of the day-to-day grind that drives the retention (or turnover) of RNs. When opportunities abound, it is easy to jump ship, and when turnover begins, it is usually the best and brightest who are first to depart. Recent research reported a whopping 27.1% average voluntary turnover rate among new graduate nurses during their first year of employment. Aging of the nurse workforce may be the largest factor impacting health care work environments, as employers struggle to diminish the physical effect of lifting thousands of pounds and walking several miles during each shift. Every influence on the work environment (management, peer behavior, patient acuity, equipment availability, the physical plant) should be assessed for impact on the workforce. While we cannot hope to create paradise in each work setting, we can promote an environment that is healing both to patient and to caregiver.     

The role of employee communication in a changing health care environment

Employee communication and medical management are two vital components of an effective health care delivery system. They must work together to support appropriate, cost-effective care and the efficient consumption of resources.     

Risk perception in an endogenous information environment

This study examines risk perception in an endogenous information setting, where information about an uncertain event can only be gathered if the uncertain event is chosen over all other alternatives. We conduct a laboratory experiment that employs a driving context, where participants are asked to make route choices over uncertain routes using a driving simulator. Based on the route choices participants make, their subjective belief of travel delay can be inferred and structured estimated. The results show that: 1) The average participants initially overestimates the risk of travel delay across high- and low-risk conditions. 2) In subsequent driving periods, only participants in the lowest risk condition express significant downward belief adjustment, resulting in their beliefs no longer being significantly different from the objective risk. This is consistent with the toll fee being the most elastic in the lowest risk condition, and the most inelastic in the higher risk conditions.     

Greening work: labor market policies for the environment

Empirica - Jobs are essential for social inclusion, raising taxes, and guaranteeing the financial resilience of (welfare) states. At the same time, the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris...     

Human rights issues and employee benefit plans

Canadians have human rights protections at both provincial and federal levels of government. At the federal level, the most important legislative enactments are the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the "Charter") and the Canadian Human Rights Act. Provincially and territorially, human rights are legislatively safeguarded primarily by provincial human rights codes. Both federally and provincially, human rights may also be impacted by a variety of other statutes and regulations such as employment standards acts, workers' compensation acts, occupational health and safety acts, and pay equity legislation.     

The status of employee caregiver benefits

The number of employee caregivers in the workforce is growing. This trend will impact on employers in both the public and private sectors.     

Broad-based employee stock options grants and IPO firms

This paper examines the broad-based grant of employee stock options (ESOs) in the period following the Initial Public Offering (IPO). Stock option grants are used to reduce the negative effects of conflicts of interests associated with a firm's going public. The study documents that option grants can be seen as corporate governance instruments for a number of model specifications. Also, it is found that there is a robust relation between option grants and market and accounting returns, respectively. To the best of the authors' knowledge, no previous study has investigated the determinants of the grants of employee stock options in the post-IPO period to both upper-level and lower-level executives during a period of sixteen years. Because the cross-sectional data of this study amply encompasses more than a business cycle it is possible to examine the grants of ESOs across tight and soft labour markets. During the former type of labour market it appears that more options are granted. Also, the empirical results provide evidence that option grants are an increasing function of the employees’ benefits for the firm. Finally, the findings show that cash constrained firms appear to use employee stock option grants in place of cash compensation.     

Reading and understanding employee benefit plan financial statements

If your employee benefit plan has more than 100 participants, chances are you've had to work your way through the audited financial statements you're required to include with your Form 5500 filing. These statements contain a wealth of information about the financial health of your plan, and understanding them is an important fiduciary responsibility. To strengthen your grasp of financial statements, this article gives an overview that will make a plan's financial statements more informative, explains their basic structure and provides information on some of the more arcane aspects (such as actuarial tables). While this article focuses on Taft-Hartley (multiemployer) plans, much of it applies to other types of employee benefit plans.     

Public employee pensions and the local labor budget

This paper examines the causes and consequences of public employee pension funding by local governments. The pension funding decision is analyzed within the context of two models: one where current taxpayers stay and pay employees' future retirement benefits and a second model where current taxpayers move and thereby hope to avoid paying future retirement benefits. The empirical results test the alternative models for a sample of 60 large U.S. cities using data for local police and fire services. The effects of underfunding on local wages and employment is then examined and found to be significant. Implications for national pension funding policy are drawn.     

Ascertaining the effects of employee bonus plans

The effect of employee bonus plans may be difficult to ascertain empirically if the size of bonus is not large enough in magnitude compared to base salary. This study makes use of data from Taiwan where employee bonus payments are not only mandated by law but are quite often several times a typical employee's annual base salary. The use of this unique data allows one to empirically observe interesting relationships difficult to ascertain from traditional datasets. Evidence is found that the performance of bonus-paying firms is related to the size of bonuses paid, both before and after analysis, and across industries. In general, evidence seems to indicate that bonus-paying firms tend to achieve higher productivity, better cost control and asset utilization, and share price returns. However, there may be evidence that marginal returns to employee bonuses are decreasing, reflecting the use of bonuses as substitutes for cash pay in order to attract employees in short supply. These results can serve as useful benchmarks for future studies.     

员工福利与幸福感关系分析

随着经济社会不断发展,员工对福利的要求更加多元化,企业对满足员工福利,提升员工幸福感也更为重视。如何制定合理的福利制度,进而提升员工的幸福感,促进员工更好为企业创造价值是每个企业必须重视的问题。通过文献查询、调研分析等方法,将员工福利进行了科学划分,对各类福利与员工幸福感的关系进行了分析,并对企业如何通过建立合理的福利制度来提升员工幸福感提出了建议,为企业完善福利制度,提升员工幸福感水平提供了依据。     

Management and employee buy-outs from the Austrian public sector

This paper seeks to extend our understanding of the nature and effects of privatization to the case of Austria, a relatively small economy in which management buy-outs have been a numerically important but neglected part of the privatization programme. The study reviews the development of privatization in Austria and sets management and employee buy-outs within this context. The paper identifies 35 privatization buy-outs, analysing their form and industrial distribution. Evidence from detailed interviews with the 22 largest is used to analyse the effects of buy-out on corporate change, the role of insiders and performance. Comparisons are made with the UK, where management and employee buy-outs have also been an important part of the privatization programme.     

Housing prices and crime perception

In this article, we combine data from the housing market with data from a victimization survey to estimate the effect of crime perception on housing prices in the City of Barcelona from 2004 to 2006. Using dwelling data and a hedonic price model (using both OLS and quantile regressions), in the first stage, we estimate the shadow price of the location of dwellings. In the second stage, we analyse the impact of crime perception, after controlling for other district characteristics such as local public spending and immigration, on this locational valuation. After accounting for the possible endogeneity of crime and housing prices, our findings suggest that crime exerts relevant costs beyond its direct costs. Indeed, a one standard deviation increase in perceived security is associated with a 0.57 % increase in the valuation of districts. Moreover, in districts perceived as being less safe than the average for the City of Barcelona, houses are highly discounted. Less safe districts have on average a valuation that is 1.27 % lower.     

Training and employee mobility in the British private and public sectors

The realization of the value of training for employees can take time as the training contributes dynamically to an extended development process. This research examines the empirical returns to training in three post-training situations: when the employee remains in the same job and with the same employer; when the employee transfers to a different job but remains with the same employer (internal mobility); and when the employee moves to a different employer (external mobility). Panel data and fixed effects (FE) methodology are used to quantify the joint effects of in-job training and mobility, while minimizing the potentially biasing effect of unobserved ability. In a period when public sector employment in Britain was contracting sharply, the short-term returns to training are nonetheless greater in the public sector, while the medium-term returns for both public sector and private sector employees depend on remaining within sector. The general/specific training mix, institutional influences, adverse selection, and the concept of ‘transferable’ training, all contribute to interpretation.     

组织中员工沉默的形成及其影响因素研究

随着全球经济一体化潮流的进一步延续,急剧变化的商业环境要求组织更加灵活,需要员工主动参与,分享信息,提出建设性意见。然而,现实中员工却会因种种原因选择了沉默不语。因此,对员工沉默行为的内涵、形成过程、及其影响因素进行了探讨。