In Kenya, a program allowed Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) to hire novice teachers on short-term contracts in order to reduce class sizes. Esther Duflo, Pascaline Dupas, and Michael Kremer find that even though these teachers earned much less than teachers who were civil service employees, they were absent one day less per week than those teachers and their students learned more. The civil-service teachers reduced their effort in response to the smaller classes.

Jonathan Kolstad and Amanda Kowalski analyze data on Massachusetts workers and employers before and after that state's 2006 “mandate-based health reform" went into effect. The reform required individuals to have health insurance and most employers to offer it, and it expanded publicly-subsidized coverage of health insurance. The researchers use this policy change to estimate the amount of wage income that employees are prepared to forego in return for insurance coverage. On average, they find, the provision of employer-sponsored health insurance reduces wages by $6,058 per year, slightly less than the average cost of the insurance to employers.

Gopi Shah Goda, Colleen Flaherty Manchester, and Aaron Sojourner conducted a field experiment to determine how providing income and balance projections to workers might influence whether and how much they save in a voluntary retirement plan. The researchers divided a sample of almost 17,000 employees working at the University of Minnesota and eligible to participate in a voluntary retirement plan into four groups: two received information on projected balances and retirement income, one received only basic information about how to sign up for the plan, and the final group did not receive any information. The authors find that those who received income projections along with enrollment information were more likely to change their contribution levels and to increase their annual contributions relative to those who did not receive that information. While not all employees changed their contributions, among those who did the average change was an increase of approximately $1,150.

Juan Carlos Gozzi, Ross Levine, Maria Martinez Peria, and Sergio Schmukler construct a dataset with information on the major characteristics of 116,338 corporate bond issues by 13,920 firms from 99 countries in domestic and international markets between 1991 and 2008. The researchers find that domestic and international bond markets provide different financial services; they are not substitutes, but rather complements. International debt issues tend to be larger, of shorter maturity, denominated in foreign currency, and to include a higher fraction of fixed rate contracts. Furthermore, firms often remain active in domestic bond markets even after accessing international markets. Many firms use both bond markets for different types of issues.

Target-date funds were available to more than two million participants in over 1000 defined contribution pension plans by the year 2010. Analyzing data from a major 401(k) plan provider covering the period 2003-10, Olivia Mitchell and Stephen Utkus find that the number of participants defaulting into employer-selected target-date funds has been increasing. It seems that target date funds act as a form of implicit employer-provided, life cycle investment advice among those who actively make pension decisions.