Lazear, Edward P. "Hiring Risky Workers". NBER Working Paper No. 5334, November 1995
The original article summarizing the idea of risky workers as valuable options.
Acemoglu, D. and J. D. Angrist "Consequences of Employment Protection? The Case of the Americans with Disabilities Act". Journal of Political Economy109 (5) (October 2001): 915-957.
For men of all working ages and women under 40, Current Population Survey data show a sharp drop in the employment of disabled workers after the ADA went into effect. The authors attribute this drop to the fact that (a) disabled workers are risky workers, in the sense that their future productivity is uncertain, and (b) the ADA increased the cost of dismissing a disabled worker.
Pallais, Amanda. “Inefficient hiring in entry-level labor markets” American Economic Review. 2014; 104(11): 3565-3599.
Inexperienced workers on online labor market platforms like ODesk are “risky” to employers because they have no previous employer reviews to indicate their quality. Pallais estimates the extent to which this harms or helps their employment prospects by hiring 952 randomly-selected workers and giving them either detailed or coarse public evaluations. Both hiring workers and providing more detailed evaluations substantially improved workers' subsequent employment outcomes.
Button, Patrick. 2018. "Expanding Employment Discrimination Protections for Individuals with Disabilities: Evidence from California" ILR Review, 71(2), pp. 365–393.
Studies the effect of the 2001 Prudence Kay Poppink Act in California, which broadened employment protections for disabled workers. In contrast to Acemoglu and Autor, Button finds that this Act significantly increased employment of individuals with disabilities, with the effect persisting at least partially up to six years later.
Doepke, Matthias and Ruben Gaetani (2020) Why Didn't the College Premium Rise Everywhere? Employment Protection and On-the-Job Investment in Skills NBER working paper no. 27331
The authors develop a model where firms and workers make relationship-specific investments in skill accumulation. The incentive to invest is stronger when employment protection creates an expectation of long-lasting matches. The authors argue that the relative decline of employment protection for less-educated workers in the U.S. (compared to Germany), can account for much of decline in those workers’ earnings in the U.S, compared to the better-protected workers in Germany.