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The aim of the paper is to estimate the effects of increasing debt burden on the wage share of national income in the eurozone from 1999 to 2019 in the attempt to verify, through a dynamic panel data cointegrating technique, whether an increasing debt implies a redistribution of resources from workers to non-wage incomes. To deepen this analysis, the empirical investigation also distinguishes between change in primary public balance and interest payments to evaluate separately the effects of the two components of public debt on wages. The outcomes are consistent with a negative relationship between public debt as a whole and the wage share. However, when accounting for the two debt components, opposite results are registered as the debt service is negatively connected, while change in primary public deficit is positively connected with the wage share of national GDP. These results allow reflecting on the interaction between the monetary policy strategy and the national fiscal policies in the eurozone.

We extend a directed technical change (DTC) model without scale effects that allows labour share to vary over time. By decomposing the labour share by sectors, skilled and unskilled, and, in line w...

Several studies argue that the recent decline in the secular trend of the labour income share is mostly driven by capital-embodied technological progress which is typically identified with trend re...

This article analyses wage flexibility as a factor in the unemployment rate across 12 Euro Area countries. We use extensive evidence pertaining to the countercyclical behaviour of the labour income share ratio to estimate its equilibrium value in the long run. This measure is calculated using a hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curve. Additionally, by using spatial econometrics, we can incorporate into the study the interdependence in the inflation among the countries. As a result, we identify countries that might see an improvement in their employment rates by improving their wage flexibility. We also identify countries with high unemployment that is not a consequence of a lack of wage flexibility.

A new gender wage gap decomposition methodology is introduced, which does not suffer from identification problems caused by unobserved nondiscriminatory wage structure. The methodology is used to measure the relative size of Korean gender wage gaps, from 1994 to 2000 across industries, differentiated by industrial knowledge intensity, where knowledge intensity is the extent to which industries produce or employ high-technology products. Korea represents an important case study, since it possesses one of the fastest growing knowledge-intensive economies among industrialized countries. Empirical results indicate that over this period, discrimination (the unexplained portion of the gender wage gaps) in Korea was statistically smaller in knowledge-intensive industries than in industries with low knowledge intensity. Also, discrimination was declining on average over the period. This suggests that continued growth in knowledge-intensive industries in Korea may lead to further declines in the overall gender gap.

Which dimensions of wage setting differ across establishments applying collective contracts and uncovered establishments? The empirical analysis reported here utilizes German linked employer–employee data for the years 1990, 1995 and 2001 and is restricted to workers without supervisory functions in larger manufacturing firms. Results show that the expected wage of an average worker is higher in firms applying collective contracts, while returns to human capital and the gender wage gap are reduced. Moreover, during the 1990s these effects became stronger.

This paper analyses whether employees and firms differently benefit from particular human resource (hr) practices. The focus is on small firms that may be badly informed on the impact of hr practices on firm performance. In this study on dutch pharmacies, it is found that firms do not reward employees’ skills according to their contribution to firms’ productivity, as (1) employees are over-rewarded for their sector-specific skills and under-rewarded for the productivity enhancing effect of their computer skills and (2) employees’ work experience positively affects their wages but does not have real productivity effects. Moreover, it is found that training employees in case of vacancy problems seems to be an adequate hr practice, since it increases productivity without affecting the average wage level. The opposite holds for offering higher wages to newly recruited employees. Furthermore, we find that only the employees benefit from performance evaluation interviews, whereas employing many employees by temporary contracts appears to have a negative effect on productivity, without affecting the wage level.

This paper provides more evidence that the wage differential is far smaller than is suggested by simple comparison of gross wages of full-time and part-time workers. It is noted that to obtain a more reasonable measure of the full-time and part-time wage differential, it is necessary to adjust for differences in workers' characteristics, labour market conditions and sample selection. It is found that, in general, full-time and part-time workers exhibit different personal characteristics. In particular, full-time workers possess more human capital and experience than part-timers. Also, labour market conditions such as unions and pension plans favour full-timers. These differences may partly account for the wage disparity between full-time and part-time workers. It was noted that the nonrandomness of the workers into full-time and part-time jobs influences the wage determination of both full-time and part-time workers. The results indicate that the adjustment of the wage equations to reflect the above menti...

This paper sets out to establish the main determinants of variations in the demand for aggregate labour in manufacturing and service sectors (22) for a cross-section of OECD countries (14). We employed a relatively new panel data set in our analysis, the OECD's International Sectoral Data Base. Preliminary analysis revealed that the "within" sector variation in the wage share dominated overall variation for most countries and time periods. A separate dynamic model was thus generated to explain the "within" sector variation in the wage share. This model contained real wages, output, the capital stock, technological change (total factor productivity) and trade (the imports to value-added ratio) as independent variables. In addition we also interacted the wage level with these explanatory variables on the presumption that skill is positively correlated with the level of wages. Because of the potential for simultaneity bias, estimation was conducted by IV and OLS. The main findings were that the capital stock and technological change were the main determinants of shifts in labour demand. While some countries reported the trade variable as significant its influence was only of slight importance in most cases. The interaction terms proved to be significant in a large number of countries. We found some evidence that capital and technological were complementary with skill. Overall we found broad agreement across countries in the factors which influence labour demand despite considerable differences in the cross-country nature of labour market institutions.

This study analyses the role of changes in informal/formal relative employment, wage levels and wage inequality in explaining increasing wage dispersion in Mexico during the 1987–1993 period. From 1987 to 1993, the variance of the log of hourly wages for Mexican workers increased by more than 50 per cent. Using data from the Encuesta nacional de empleo urbano we find that this increase in the overall wage dispersion was mainly driven by increasing wage dispersion in the formal sector coupled with a faster growth in formal sector employment as a percentage of total employment. However, compression in the distribution of wages within the informal sector contributed to substantially slowdown the increasing overall wage inequality. About 60 per cent of the 1987–1993 4.65 percentage point reduction in the informal sector share of total employment is explained by changes in the structure that determines sectoral employment; the rest is explained by changes in the composition of the labour force, particularly in...

The existence of a trade-off between occupational risk and earnings is well known. Most studies, however, ignore how public insurance systems, like workers' compensation (WC) affect this trade-off. This paper incorporates the workers' compensation system into a hedonic earnings function for paid employees. The results show that workers' compensation lowers the wage-risk trade-off for a sample of Ontario workers. In the absence of workers' compensation, employees would receive a significantly higher risk premium for exposure to the possibility of occupational injuries. This implies that labour markets will provide more than the socially optimal degree of risk if experience rating of workers' compensation is incomplete.

Using panel data for Norwegian industries, we establish a significant permanent relation between industry wages and industry profitability. The estimated long-run insider weight is above 0.2 and stable both over time and across industries. Industry wages are significantly affected by aggregate unemployment, and the preferred wage equation implies a highly convex wage curve.

A detailed analysis is provided of the shape of the wage curve using annual time series for Norwegian manufacturing. The main results are summarized as follows. Unemployment affects wages significantly, and we provide evidence in favour of a monotonically decreasing but highly non-linear wage curve. The long-term unemployed exert less of a wage dampening effect than do recently laid off workers, and real wage responsiveness to unemployment seems also to be stronger with higher inflation.

The economic effects of the minimum wage have become increasingly ambiguous. Historically, economists have asserted that increases in the minimum wage result in increases in unemployment. This relationship has been challenged recently by Card and Krueger, Katz and Krueger, and Card. These authors have provided empirical evidence that seems to indicate that there is no relationship between various economic variables (such as level of employment, and product price, among others) and the minimum wage. In addition, these authors have not provided a cogent presentation of the effects of the minimum wage on part-time employment. This study examines, from a theoretical standpoint, the effects of the minimum wage on employment. Furthermore, we emphasize the distinction between money wages and full wages; and the role that part-time employmentplays in the analysis. After incorporating these factors into a theoretical presentation, we provide empirical evidence by way of an OLS regression. We conclude that firms re...

We employ the Brock, Dechert and Scheinkman statistic to investigate non-linearity in conditional mean in UK real wages, employment and output, and to fit threshould regression models to the series. The latter porvide reasonable representations for thenon-lineraity in real wages and output but the residuals from the threshold autoregressive model for employment still contain a non-linear component. In a forecast comparison the TAR models performed better than simple autoregressions. Using the lagged share of wages as an error-correction term we find evidence that all three series respond asymmetrically to lagged changes in wage share and other variables. Fore-casts of real wages and employment derived from these models were superior to those derived from standard, symmetric, ECMs.

The vast literture on wage determination in the post-war era extensively documents the existence of large and persistent wage differentials among industries and workers of comparable skills. This paper addresses the issue of wage dispersion in the context of the Italian economy. The stability over time of industry relative wages confirme previous results obtained for the other countries. A wide class of earings equations is estimated using microdata for the Italian manufacturing industry. The results provide little evidence in support of the view that wage dispersion can be explained by either unmeasured workers' charcteristics or by compensating wage differentials. Conversely, the estimated pattern of industry-occupation wage differentials is consistent with the existence of rent sharing mechanisms and fairness considerations.

Recent models of wage bargaining provide the background for formulating a wage-employment model which is estimated for the manufacturing sector in Denmark. Emphasis is laid on an interpretation of the empirical findings in a maroeconomic context. The major results are that wage setting is not characterized by money illusion, shorter working hours lead in the long run to full wage compensation and a fall in total number of hours worked, and expansionary demand management policies induce wage increases which eventually eliminate the expansionary effects on activity.