Flexible Benefits and Employee Choice

Flexible Benefits and Employee Choice summarizes literature on a series of issues related to flexible compensation. Both academic and practical pieces published in the areas of economics, demography, business, sociology, psychology, law, and administration are included. The review is divided into five main sections. The first section presents an overview of the literature on flexible compensation. Within this broad overview, subsections focus on (1) the advent and growth of flexible compensation; (2) the present legal status of flexible compensation; (3) the design, structure, and operation of flexible compensation plans; (4) the advantages and disadvantages of flexible compensation plans; and (5) the future outlook for flexible compensation. The second section presents seven organization case studies. The organizations were chosen so as to capture a range of industries, flexible compensation plans, and experiences with those plans. The third section presents 56 abstracts of the main published pieces on this subject. References to the abstracted material plus some additional pieces relating to fringe-benefit systems and benefit planning are listed in the section entitled 'Recommended Reading.' The section on 'Additional Reading' lists many older pieces on flexible compensation and fringe benefits which might be of some use to practitioners and other individuals trying to develop a deeper and more historical understanding of the development of the literature on this subject.

David E. Bloom is Clarence James Gamble Professor of Economics and Demography at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. He is also Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and Research Fellow at IZA - Institute of Labor Economics. Bloom received a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University in 1976 and a Ph.D. in Economics and Demography from Princeton University in 1981. Bloom previously served on the public policy faculty at Carnegie-Mellon University and on the economics faculties at Harvard University and Columbia University. In recent years, he has written extensively on the links among health, education, population, and labor, and on economic valuation.