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For a long time, migration has been subject to intensive economic research. Nevertheless, empirical evidence regarding the determinants of migration still appears to be incomplete. In this paper, we analyze the effects of socio-economic and institutional determinants, especially labor-market institutions, on migrants' choices. Based on a large data set constructed from micro-data for France, Germany, the UK and the US, we study their decisions to migrate to one of the four countries using a Multinomial Choice framework. Our estimates confirm a number of conventional results such as positive effects of wages and immigrant networks and negative effects of unemployment rates. In addition, we find that employment protection, union coverage and unemployment benefits have positive effects on migration. Also good education and health systems tend to attract migrants, while generous pension systems may deter them. Based on separate estimations for high- and low-skilled migrants, there is evidence that the effects of labor-market institutions differ across skill groups.

We present a semiparametric method to estimate group-level dispersion, which is particularly effective in the presence of censored data. We apply this procedure to obtain measures of occupation-specific wage dispersion using top-coded administrative wage data from the German IAB Employment Sample. We then relate these robust measures of earnings risk to the risk attitudes of individuals working in these occupations. We find that willingness to take risk is positively correlated with the wage dispersion of an individual’s occupation.

Using representative linked employer-employee data for Germany, this paper analyzes short- and long-run differences in labor market performance of workers joining start-ups instead of incumbent firms. Applying entropy balancing and following individuals over ten years, we find huge and long-lasting drawbacks from entering a start-up in terms of wages, yearly income, and (un)employment. These disadvantages hold for all groups of workers and types of start-ups analyzed. Although our analysis of different subsequent career paths highlights important heterogeneities, it does not reveal any strategy through which workers joining start-ups can catch up with the income of similar workers entering incumbent firms.

This paper tests for downward nominal wage rigidity in markets for casual daily agricultural labor in a developing country context. I examine wage and employment responses to rainfall shocks—which shift labor demand—in 500 Indian districts from 1956-2008. First, there is asymmetric wage adjustment: nominal wages rise in response to positive shocks but do not fall during droughts. Second, after transitory positive shocks have dissipated, nominal wages do not return to previous levels—they remain high in future years. Third, inflation moderates these eects: when inflation is higher, real wages are more likely to fall during droughts and after transitory positive shocks. Fourth, wage distortions generate employment distortions, creating boom and bust cycles: employment is lower in the year after a transitory positive shock than if the positive shock had not occurred; landless laborers experience a 6% employment reduction. Fifth, consistent with the misallocation of labor across farms, households with smaller landholdings increase labor supply to their own farms when they are rationed out of the external labor market. These findings indicate that wage rigidity lowers employment levels and increases employment volatility—in a setting with few institutional constraints. Data from a new survey I conducted in two Indian states suggests that agricultural workers and employers: view nominal wage cuts as unfair; are considerably less likely to regard real wage cuts as unfair if they are achieved through inflation; and believe that nominal wage cuts cause eort reductions.

Inspired by a recent observation about an online retail company, this paper explains why a firm may find it optimal to offer an exit bonus to recent hires so as to induce self-selection. We study a double adverse selection problem, in which the principal can neither observe agents’ commitment to the job nor their intrinsic motivation. A steep wage-tenure profile deters uncommitted agents from applying. An exit bonus can stimulate that –among the committed agents– those who discovered that they are not intrinsically motivated for the job discontinue employment with the principal. Our key findings are that offering an exit bonus increases profits when the first adverse selection problem is sufficiently severe compared to the second and that the exit bonus needs to come as a surprise for the agents in order to function well.

A clear consensus has emerged that agglomeration economies are an important factor explaining why firms cluster next to each other. Yet, because of non-trivial measurement challenges, disagreement remains over the sources of these agglomeration effects. This paper is the first to present direct evidence showing how localized knowledge spillovers arise from workers changing jobs within the same local labor market. Specifically, I assess the extent to which firm-to-firm labor mobility enhances the productivity of firms located near highly productive firms. Using a unique dataset combining Social Security earnings records and balance sheet information for Veneto, a region in Italy with many successful industrial clusters, I first identify a set of highly productive firms, then show that hiring workers with experience at these firms significantly increases the productivity of other firms. To address identification threats arising from both contemporaneous and future unobservable firm-level productivity shocks correlated with hiring, I use control function methods drawn from the productivity literature and a novel instrumental variable strategy, which exploits downsizing events at highly productive firms. My findings imply that worker flows can explain around 10 percent of the productivity gains experienced by incumbent firms when new highly productive firms are added to a local labor market.

In this study, we build a Kaleckian model incorporating institutional differences between the wage determination of regular employment and that of non-regular employment. Using this model, we investigate how an employment shift toward regular workers affects the capacity utilization rate and income distribution. Our results show that while such shift in employment decreases the capacity utilization rate and increases the wage share of regular workers, it either increases or decreases the wage share of non-regular workers. An increase in the flexibility of the labor market, as seen in an employment shift toward non-regular workers, increases the amplitude of business cycles. However, the introduction of a minimum wage fornon-regular workers stabilizes the economy.

Although Hirschman's exit-voice theoretical model has been applied to labor markets, research up to now has not tested one of its most important features: the impact of job quality on exit-voice strategies. Hirschman's model of consumer behavior explains that those individuals unsatisfied with a product's quality are more likely to "voice," whereas those more concerned with its price are more likely to "exit." A rationale for this trade- off is based on information: first, information on the price of alternative options is much more accessible than information on quality; second, voice produces more information than exit and favors opportunities for specific improvements. We transpose Hirschman's assumptions to labor markets and use the French SalSa survey and DADS, declaration by employers on social data, to examine the conditions under which French employees are more likely to exit, and the conditions under which they are more likely to voice. Our results support the Hirschmanian hypothesis. A deterioration by one unit in our working-conditions index increases the probability of participation in collective action by 5 percentage points. An increase in log hourly wage by one unit decreases the probability of quitting by 5 percentage points.

We present a flexible model of wage dynamics where information about job openings is transmitted through social networks. We show that the individuals' wages dynamic is positively associated across time and that this result holds outside the stationary distribution, and under observed and unobserved heterogeneity. We present an empirical application using the British Household Panel Survey by exploiting direct information about individual's social networks. We find that having more employed friends leads to more job offers, but to slightly lower offered wages. We also find that non-relative friends are more helpful than relatives, and that individuals benefit relatively more from their male friends.

Which and how many attributes are relevant for the sorting of agents in a matching market? This paper addresses these questions by constructing indices of mutual attractiveness that aggregate information about agents' attributes. The first k indices for agents on each side of the market provide the best approximation of the matching surplus by a k-dimensional model. The methodology is applied on a unique Dutch households survey containing information about education, height, BMI, health, attitude toward risk and personality traits of spouses., 72 pages, 5 tables

We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic, and of the government-mandated measures to contain its spread, affect the self-employed – particularly women – in Germany. For our analysis, we use representative, real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about their situation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings indicate that among the self-employed, who generally face a higher likelihood of income losses due to COVID-19 than employees, women are 35% more likely to experience income losses than their male counterparts. Conversely, we do not find a comparable gender gap among employees. Our results further suggest that the gender gap among the self-employed is largely explained by the fact that women disproportionately work in industries that are more severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our analysis of potential mechanisms reveals that women are significantly more likely to be impacted by government-imposed restrictions, i.e. the regulation of opening hours. We conclude that future policy measures intending to mitigate the consequences of such shocks should account for this considerable variation in economic hardship., CEPA Discussion Papers; 27

We study, theoretically and empirically, the effects of incentives on the self-selection and coordination of motivated agents to produce a social good. Agents join teams where they allocate effort to either generate individual monetary rewards (selfish effort) or contribute to the production of a social good with positive effort complementarities (social effort). Agents differ in their motivation to exert social effort. Our model predicts that lowering incentives for selfish effort in one team increases social good production by selectively attracting and coordinating motivated agents. We test this prediction in a lab experiment allowing us to cleanly separate the selection effect from other effects of low incentives. Results show that social good production more than doubles in the low- incentive team, but only if self-selection is possible. Our analysis highlights the important role of incentives in the matching of motivated agents engaged in social good production.

In many countries, women are over-represented among low-wage employees, which is why a wage floor could benefit them particularly. Following this notion, we analyse the impact of the German minimum wage introduction in 2015 on the gender wage gap. Germany poses an interesting case study in this context, since it has a rather high gender wage gap and set the minimum wage at a relatively high level, affecting more than four million employees. Based on individual data from the Structure of Earnings Survey, containing information for over one million employees working in 60,000 firms, we use a difference-in- difference framework that exploits regional differences in the bite of the minimum wage. We find a significant negative effect of the minimum wage on the regional gender wage gap. Between 2014 and 2018, the gap at the 10th percentile of the wage distribution was reduced by 4.6 percentage points (or 32%) in regions that were strongly affected by the minimum wage compared to less affected regions. For the gap at the 25th percentile, the effect still amounted to -18%, while for the mean it was smaller (-11%) and not particularly robust. We thus find that the minimum wage can indeed reduce gender wage disparities. While the effect is highest for the low-paid, it also reaches up into higher parts of the wage distribution., CEPA Discussion Papers; 40

In this paper, I analyse production and labour market data from a random sample of manufacturing firms in Ethiopia in order to test for skill formation and job matching effects in wage growth. Based on estimated labor market experience and job seniority profiles of relative marginal pro¬ductivity and relative wages, I find that both on-the-job skill formation and job matching are significant sources the growth of productivity and wages with time in the labour market. However, there is also evidence in the same data that job matching is by far the more important of the two sources: net mobility gains are at least twice the return to skill formation for workers with at most ten years of time in the labour market.

This paper argues that the prevalence of compensation systems which reward winners without explicitly identifying losers can be rationalized by workers` concern for relative payoffs. If the workers` participation constraints are binding, the firm must compensate its employees for the disutility that they may derive from low status. It follows that profit-maximizing employers may be particularly reluctant to penalize or give poor performance evaluation to employees. The theory also sheds light on many other puzzling features of incentive schemes in practice, such as small salary premia, rat races, job title proliferation, the gender wage gap, the gender/happiness paradox and the widespread use of tournaments as a sorting device.

In this paper, I study how an increase in the use of new work practices that involve multi-tasking has affected the returns to experience. If each task in a job has a concave learning curve, then increasing the number of tasks may increase the returns to experience. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I provide evidence for the fact that successive cohorts have greater returns to experience. Next, I construct proxies for multi-tasking using Paul Osterman's 1992 survey of workplace practices in U.S. establishments, and find that (i) later cohorts choose jobs with greater multi-tasking, (ii) the rate of within-job wage growth rises with the degree of multi-tasking, and (iii) the returns to experience are larger in jobs with more multi-tasking. Finally, I find mixed evidence on the effect of unobserved heterogeneity, which implies that part of these larger returns to experience may be because those in jobs with more multi-tasking have higher unobserved ability.

We investigate wage and productivity profiles in the Ghanaian Manufacturing sector using matched firm and worker data. Following Medoff and Abraham (1980, 1981), we use performance appraisal as our measure of individual productivity. Controlling for a wide range of human capital variables, including cognitive skills, we find that on average wage profiles do reflect productivity profiles. However, wages are steeper in large and unionized firms. This suggests that human capital theory holds for small and non-unionized firms, but that not hold for large and unionized companies.

This paper discusses and documents a new dataset of real wages for unskilled, semi-skilled, and relatively skilled labour in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela (LA-6) over the period 1900-2011. Three interrelated aspects are examined: the wage growth record associated with periods dominated by a particular development strategy; wage convergence across the LA-6; and changes in wage skill premiums and their links with fundamentals. The key findings are: i) the region’s unskilled wage rose by 147% in the period compared to rises of 243% in the average wage and 440% in income per worker (including both property and labour income); ii) there is a limited process of wage convergence across the LA-6; and weak persistence in the country hierarchy; iii) skill premiums tended to peak during the middle decades of the 20th century, coinciding with the acceleration of industrialisation and the timing of the demographic transition. Movements in the terms of trade are broadly associated with both fluctuations and trends in wage premiums, though the direction of the link is country and time specific.

What is the impact of joining the European Union on a small, less developed economy? This is the general question driving this research paper. In particular, the role of factor movements in explaining real wage behavior in Portugal after its entry in the European Union (EU) is evaluated. Based on these results, counterfactual exercises are performed to measure the impact of foreign investment and emigration on skilled and unskilled wages between 1985 and 1999. We find a small role for labor movements, and a more important one for capital inflows. This should constitute a good starting point to think about the consequences of the Eastern enlargement of the EU and of other integration experiences that abolish barriers to factor mobility.

We analyze empirically the impact of urban agglomeration on Italian wages. Using micro-data from the Bank of Italy`s Survey of Household Income and Wealth for the years 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2002 on more than 22,000 employees distributed to 242 randomly drawn local labor markets (30 percent of the total), we test whether the structure of wages varies with urban scale. We find that every additional 100 employees per square kilometer (100,000 inhabitants) in the local labor market raises earnings by 0.4-0.6 percent (0.1 percent) and that employees working in large cities earn, on average, 2-3 percent higher wages than those in the rest of the economy. The application of spatial data analysis techniques enables us to state that this effect is present only in the large cities surrounded by low-populated areas. We also find that urbanization does not affect returns to experience and that it reduces returns to education and to tenure with current firm, while providing a premium to managers, worker supervisors, and office workers.

Several studies for the UK and other countries have shown that a significant number of university graduates are in jobs that do not require a university degree i.e., over-educated. This paper using data from one large civic university in the UK investigates the true incidence and determinants of over-education. The results indicate that previous studies have largely over-stated the extent of over-education in the graduate labour market. Various labour market constraints as well as the vocational orientation of educational qualification were shown to be among most important factors that influence graduate placement.

Paid parental leave schemes have been shown to increase women’s employment rates but de-crease their wages in case of extended leave durations. In view of these potential trade-offs, many countries are discussing the optimal design of parental leave policies. We analyze the impact of a major parental leave reform on mothers’ long-term earnings. The 2007 German parental leave re-form replaced a means-tested benefit with a more generous earnings-related benefit that is grant-ed for a shorter period of time. Additionally, a “daddy quota” of two months was introduced. To identify the causal effect of this policy on long-run earnings of mothers, we use a difference-in-difference approach that compares labor market outcomes of mothers who gave birth just before and right after the reform and nets out seasonal effects by including the year before. Using admin-istrative social security data, we confirm previous findings and show that the average duration of employment interruptions increased for high-income mothers. Nevertheless, we find a positive long-run effect on earnings for mothers in this group. This effect cannot be explained by changes in working hours, observed characteristics, changes in employer stability or fertility patterns. De-scriptive evidence suggests that the stronger involvement of fathers, incentivized by the “daddy months”, could have facilitated mothers’ re-entry into the labor market and thereby increased earnings. For mothers with low prior-to-birth earnings, however, we do not find any beneficial labor market effects of this parental leave reform., CEPA Discussion Papers, 16

Using quantile regression methods, this paper analyses the gender wage gap across the wage distribution and over time (1990–2014), while controlling for changing sample selection into full-time employment. Our findings show that the selection-corrected gender wage gap is much larger than the one observed in the data, which is mainly due to large positive selection of women into full-time employment. However, we show that selection-corrected wages of male and female workers at the lower half of the distribution have moderately converged over time. The reason for this development have been changes in the composition of the male full-time employment force over time, which in spite of the rather constant male full-time employment rate, have given place to a small but rising selection bias in male observed wages. In the upper half of the wage distribution, however, neither the observed nor the selection-corrected gender wage gap has narrowed over time., CEPA Discussion Papers, 15

Data reveal that individuals experience a high number of occupational switches. Over 40% of high school graduates transition between white and blue collar occupations more than once between the ages of 18 and 28. This paper develops a life cycle model of occupational choices based on workers learning about their type and sorting themselves to the best job match. Documenting life cycle patterns of occupational choices using data from the NLSY79 supports key predictions from the model. Initial characteristics are predictive of future patterns of occupational switching, including the timing and number of switches. In addition, the average time to the first occupational switch is longer than the time to the second switch for individuals with multiple occupational transitions.

We study the labor market impact of opening borders to low-wage countries. The analysis exploits time and regional variation provided by the 2004 EU enlargement in combination with transport links to Sweden from the new member states. The results suggest an adverse impact on earnings of present workers in the order of 1 percent in areas close to pre-existing ferry lines. The effects are present in most segments of the labor market but tend to be greater in groups with weaker positions. The impact is also clearer in industries which have received more workers from the new member states, and for which across-the-border work is likely to be more common. There is no robust evidence on an impact on employment or wages. At least part of the effects is likely due to channels other than the ones typically considered in the literature.

This paper investigates whether the increasing “residual wage inequality” trend is related to manufacturing decline and the influx of low-skilled immigrants. There is a vast literature arguing that technological change, international trade, and institutional factors have played a significant role in the inequality trend. However, most of the trend is unexplained by observable factors. This paper attempts to “explain” the growth in the unexplained variance of wages by exploiting variation across locations (states or cities) in the United States in the local level of “residual inequality.” The evidence shows that a shrinking manufacturing sector increases inequality. In addition, an influx of low-skilled immigrants increases inequality, but this effect is concentrated in areas with a steeper manufacturing decline. Similar results are found for two alternative measures linked to increasing inequality: the increasing return to education and the decline in the employment rate of non-college men. The overall evidence suggests that the manufacturing and immigration trends have hollowed-out the overall demand for middle-skilled workers in all sectors, while increasing the supply of workers in lower skilled jobs. Both phenomena are producing downward pressure on the relative wages of workers at the low end of the income distribution.

This paper explores the relationship between job polarization and interindustry wage differentials. Using the U.S. Census and EU KLEMS data, we find that the progress of job polarization between 1980 and 2009 was more evident in industries that initially paid a high wage premium to workers than in industries that did not. With a two-sector neoclassical growth model to highlight the key mechanism, we argue that this phenomenon can be explained as a dynamic response of firms to interindustry wage differentials: firms with a high wage premium seek alternative ways to cut production costs by replacing workers who perform routine tasks with Information, Communication, and Technology (ICT) capital. The replacement of routine workers with ICT capital has become more pronounced as the price of ICT capital has fallen over the past 30 years. As a result, firms that are constrained to pay a relatively high wage premium have experienced slower growth of employmentof routine workers than firms in low-wage industries, which led to heterogeneity in job polarization across industries.

This paper asks whether pay disclosure in the public sector changes wage setting at the top of the public sector distribution. I examine a 2010 California mandate that required municipal salaries to be posted online. Among top managers, disclosure led to approximately 7 percent average compensation declines, and a 75 percent increase in their quit rate, relative to managers in cities that had already disclosed salaries. The wage cuts were largely nominal. Wage cuts were larger in cities with higher initial compensation, but not in cities where compensation was initially out of line with (measured) fundamentals. The response is more consistent with public aversion to high compensation than the effects of increased accountability.

The labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Between 1980 and 2012, jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force. Math-intensive but less social jobs—including many STEM occupations—shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period. Employment and wage growth were particularly strong for jobs requiring high levels of both math skill and social skills. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers “trade tasks” to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and work together more efficiently. The model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I investigate using data from the NLSY79 and the NLSY97. Using a comparable set of skill measures and covariates across survey waves, I find that the labor market return to social skills was much greater in the 2000s than in the mid-1980s and 1990s.

This paper investigates the effect of coworker characteristics on wages, measured by the average person effect of coworkers in a wage regression. The effect of interest is identified from within-firm changes in workforce composition, controlling for person effects, firm effects, and sector-specific time trends. My estimates are based on a linked employer employee dataset for the population of workers and firms of the Italian region of Veneto for years 1982-2001. I find that a 0.1 increase in the average labour market value of coworkers’ skills (which is around one within-person standard deviation) is associated with a 3.6 percent wage premium. I also find that a sizeable share of the wage variation previously explained by unobserved individual and firm heterogeneity may be due to variation in coworker skills. An event-type study, a Placebo exercise and a series of heterogeneity analyses lend credibility to the baseline results. I also evaluate the role of the spillover effects for wage differentials between specific groups of workers. I find that around 12 percent of the gender wage gap and 10 to 16 percent of the immigrant wage gap can be explained by differences in coworker characteristics.

This paper investigates the transferability of human capital across countries and the contribution of imperfect human capital portability to the explanation of the immigrant-native wage gap. Using data for West Germany, our results reveal that, overall, education and in particular labor market experience accumulated in the home countries of the immigrants receive signifiantly lower returns than human capital obtained in Germany. We further find evidence for heterogeneity in the returns to human capital of immigrants across countries. Finally, imperfect human capital transferability appears to be a major factor in explaining the wage differential between natives and immigrants.

This paper offers the first instrumental variables estimates of the wage returns to volunteer experience. The returns are substantial and differ considerably by gender. The results imply that the unequal valuation of volunteer experience by gender is more important in explaining the gender earnings gap than is the unequal valuation of part-time paid work experience. The results also indicate negative selection into unpaid work. In a simple model of optimal volunteering, negative selection implies that a lower cost of volunteering would produce both an expanded and higher-skilled pool of volunteers, and greater societal benefits from volunteer work.

Being able to read and write is one of the most important skills in modern economies. Literacy frequently is a prerequisite for employment and its relevance for productivity and wages is magnified by the fact that it is only through literacy that many other skills become usable. More so than for natives, this argument applies to migrants: even those with high levels of human capital acquired in the country of origin often have it rendered worthless by the absence of literacy in the host country language. Using novel data from a large-scale German adult literacy test (LEO - level-one study), we investigate the determinants of literacy and show that migrants have systematically lower language skills than natives. We find that any observed raw employment and wage gaps between natives and migrants can be fully explained by these differences.

In this paper, we estimate returns to schooling for young men and women in Turkey using the exogenous and substantial variation in schooling across birth cohorts brought about by the 1997 reform of compulsory schooling within a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We estimate that the return from an extra year of schooling is about 7–8% for women and an imprecisely estimated 2–2.5% for men. The low level of the estimates for men contrasts starkly with those estimated for other developing countries. We identify several reasons why returns to schooling are low for men and why they are higher for women in our context. In particular, the policy alters the schooling distributions of men and women differently, thus the average causal effect puts a higher weight on the causal effect of schooling at higher grade levels for women than for men.

As per the conventional wisdom there should be provision for public assistance for skills acquirement for improving relative wage inequality in the future. Empirical observations on some prominent small OECD countries, however, indicate that the relationship between wage inequality and public spending on education is not necessarily unambiguous. A theoretical underpinning of this empirical observation has been provided in this study in terms of a $$2\times 3$$ general equilibrium model for a small open economy. Later, the correctness of the theoretical framework and its result have been empirically examined with the help of an unbalanced panel dataset of 13 small developed countries from 2000 to 2011. This empirical analysis supports the main theoretical result that the relationship between wage inequality and public expenditure could indeed be ambiguous. This finding questions the desirability of providing subsidy on education at least from the perspective of reduction in earnings inequality among the different sections of the working population.

Job mobility offers opportunities for workers to obtain wage increases, but the returns on job changes differ considerably. We argue that part of this inequality results from a trade-off between occupational and regional mobility. Both mobility types offer alternative strategies for improving one's labor market position; however, each type also has unique restrictions. The high costs of regional mobility can thus induce occupational changes, even though the resulting human-capital devaluation leads to lower wage increases. We use linked retrospective life-course data for Germany (ALWA-ADIAB) and apply competing risks models to show that restrictions on one type of mobility drive individuals toward the other type of mobility. Using fixed-effects regressions, we then show that regional mobility yields higher wage improvements than occupational mobility does. We argue that restrictions on both types of mobility thus not only determine which type of mobility is chosen, thereby helping explain differential careers, but also contribute to inequality in wage trajectories due to differential returns on job mobility. The trade-off has explanatory power for the inequality between certain actors with different sets of mobility restrictions, such as parents and non-parents or employees in jobs with different skill demands, and it may also contribute to our better understanding of broader patterns of inequality—for instance, that caused by between-nation differences in job mobility.

After almost a century-long pattern of rising marital instability, divorce rates leveled off in 1980 and have been declining ever since. The timing of deceleration and decline in the rates of marital disruption interestingly coincides with a period of substantial growth in wage inequality. This paper establishes a connection between the two phenomena and explores potential explanations for the underlying link. Using individual data on female marital histories in a duration analysis framework combined with regional and temporal variation in the pattern of male wage dispersion, I show that inequality has a significant stabilizing effect on the marital relationship. Quantitatively, increases in male wage dispersion can roughly explain up to 30% of the fall in the mean separation probability between 1979 and 1990. Several plausible explanations for this relationship are assessed: changes in spousal labor supplies, female wage inequality, income uncertainty, social capital as well as a hypothesis of "on-the-marriage" search. The results are most supportive of the search interpretation. No strong quantitative support was found for the remaining mechanisms.

What are the welfare effects of immigration on low-skilled and high-skilled natives? To address this question, we develop a general equilibrium model featuring two skill types, search frictions, wage bargaining, and a welfare state that redistributes income through unemployment benefits and the provision of public goods. Our quantitative analysis suggests that, in all 20 countries studied, immigration attenuates the effects of search frictions. The resulting gains tend to outweigh the welfare costs of redistribution. Immigration has increased native welfare in almost all countries. In two-thirds of countries, both high- and low-skilled natives have benefited from the presence of immigrants, contrary to what models without search frictions or redistribution predict. Average total welfare gains from migration are 1.25% and 1.00% for high- and low-skilled natives, respectively. (JEL: F22, J61, J64)

An underlying assumption in the executive compensation literature is that there is a national labor market for CEOs. The urban economics literature, however, documents higher ability among workers in large metropolitans, which results in a real and stable urban wage premium. In this paper, we investigate the link between the spatial clustering of firms in big, central cities (i.e., urban agglomeration) and the level and structure of CEO compensation. Using CEO compensation data for the period 1992–2004, we document a positive relation between the size and centrality of the city in which the firm is headquartered and the total, as well as the equity based portion of CEO pay. Our results are robust to a host of control variables, sensitivity and endogeneity tests, indicating that urban agglomeration may reflect positive externalities, such as knowledge spillovers, business connections and improved access to private information that have a positive effect on CEO pay and incentive driven compensation for good performance. We document gradual human capital gains acquired from big city work experience that are transferable to the rural area, and rewarded for, once the CEO relocates into a smaller, less central community. Our tests provide novel evidence of information spillovers and networking opportunities in big cities that can directly affect how CEOs are compensated. Such sources of information and influence represent something for which firms are willing to pay higher and more incentive driven pay, evidence in favor of a market-based explanation for CEO compensation.

We study the causal impact of the minimum wage on labor market outcomes, household consumption, inequality and poverty in Thailand by relying on policy variation in minimum wages over time across provinces. We find that minimum‐wage increases have a large and significant impact on the likelihood of working in the uncovered sector among workers with elementary education. However, the impact is very small and insignificant among other labor market groups. In contrast, the minimum wage has large positive effects on the formal sector wages of low‐earning workers, such as the young, elderly and low educated. Increases in the minimum wage are associated with reductions in household poverty and consumption inequality at the bottom half of the distribution. This research was sponsored by the World Bank under contract 7800772 and the Development Research Funds. Sanz‐de‐Galdeano gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness Grant ECO2014‐58434‐P.

In 2015, Germany introduced a statutory hourly minimum wage that was not only universally binding but also set at a relatively high level. We discuss the short-run effects of this new minimum wage on a wide set of socio-economic outcomes, such as employment and working hours, earnings and wage inequality, dependent and self-employment, as well as reservation wages and satisfaction. We also discuss difficulties in the implementation of the minimum wage and the measurement of its effects related to non-compliance and suitability of data sources. Two years after the minimum wage introduction, the following conclusions can be drawn: while hourly wages increased for low-wage earners, some small negative employment effects are also identifiable. The effects on aspired goals, such as poverty and inequality reduction, have not materialized in the short run. Instead, a tendency to reduce working hours is found, which alleviates the desired positive impact on monthly income. Additionally, the level of non-compliance was substantial in the short run, thus drawing attention to problems when implementing such a wide-reaching policy.

We study nominal wage rigidity in the Netherlands using administrative data, which has three key features: (1) high-frequency (monthly), (2) high-quality (administrative records), and (3) high coverage (the universe of workers and the universe of firms). We find wage rigidity patterns in the data that are similar to wage behavior documented for other European countries. In particular we find that the hazard function has two spikes, one at 12 months and another one at 24 months and wage changes have time and state dependency components. As a novel and important piece of evidence we also uncover substantial heterogeneity in the frequency of wage changes due to explicit terms of the labor contract. In particular, contracts featuring flexible hours, such as on-call contracts, exhibit a higher probability of a change in the contract wage compared to fixed hour contracts. Once we split the sample based on contract characteristics, we also find that the response of wage changes to the time and state component is heterogeneous across different type of contracts - with relatively more downward adjustments in flexible-hour contract wages in response to aggregate unemployment.

Immigrants contribute to the economic development of the host country, but they earn less at entry and it takes many years for them to achieve parity of income. For some immigrant groups, the wage gap never closes. There is a wide variation across countries in the entry wage gap and the speed of wage assimilation over time. Wage assimilation is affected by year of entry, immigrant skill, ethnicity, and gender. Policies that facilitate assimilation of immigrant workers provide support for education, language, and employment. Such policies can also reduce barriers to entry, encourage naturalization, and target selection of immigrants.

Nilsen, Ø.A., Raknerud, A. & Skjerpen, T. (2017). Estimation of a model for matched panel data with high-dimensional two-way unobserved heterogeneity. Empirical Economics, 53 (4): 1657-1680. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00181-016-1179-0 We consider a model for matched data with two types of unobserved effects: a random effect related to the main observational unit and a random or fixed effect related to a secondary unit to which the main unit is matched. In typical applications, e.g., on registry data, there is a curse of dimensionality which we propose to mitigate using an iterative feasible GLS approach on variables subjected to the Helmert transformation. Control functions allow for correlation between the explanatory variables and the random effects. This approach is illustrated by a wage equation with unobserved individual- and firm-specific effects and an endogenous years-of-schooling variable.

We estimate foreign ownership wage premiums for every 3-digit manufacturing industry in China and discover a wide range of premiums both for so-called "foreign" ownership and for overseas Chinese ownership of firms. Foreign ownership generates larger and more prevalent wage premiums than overseas Chinese ownership of firms, but both types of foreign ownership produce wage premiums that respond similarly in hypothesis testing of determinants. Using the number of computers per worker as an indicator of a firm’s technology level, we find support in 76-78% of industries for the hypothesis that foreign firms pay higher wages to reduce the risk of worker turnover and the accompanying technology leakage to domestic rivals. However, this determinant explains only 5-6% of the foreign wage premium, on average. We find the most intensive support for the "fair wage" hypothesis that foreign firms pay higher wages because they are more profitable than domestic firms and workers in more profitable firms expect to be paid more, otherwise they will shirk. This hypothesis explains an average of 8-9% of the foreign wage premiums, with support for the hypothesis found in 72-75% of the industries using firm’s total profits per worker as the added wage determinant. Intangible assets and training costs were found to be much weaker individual determinants of foreign wage premiums. When we consider the best combination of explanatory variables to include in each industry’s wage regression, we find support for our combined hypotheses in the vast majority of industries, but we still find large residual wage premiums attached to foreign ownership in China.

We show that officer training during the Swedish military service has a strong positive effect on the probability of attaining a managerial position later in life. The most intense type of officer training increases the probability of becoming a civilian manager by about 5 percentage points, or 75%. Officer training also increases educational attainment post–military service. We argue that the effect on civilian leadership could be due to the acquisition of leadership-specific skills during the military service, and we present suggestive evidence related to alternative mechanisms, such as signaling, networks, and training unrelated to leadership.

This paper documents the evolution of the experience-earnings profiles of private employees in Italy over the first six years of working career across three birth cohorts (1965-1969, 1970- 1974, 1975-1979). We explore the average trends and disentangle how the patterns vary according to individual skills, defined in terms of both educational levels and percentiles of the unconditional earnings distribution. Unlike previous studies, and in contrast with the expectations prompted by the skill-biased literature, our results surprisingly show that the Italian "best of youth", i.e. the best workers of the most recent cohorts (the high skilled), have suffered, compared to the previous cohorts, an earnings penalty much more severe than that experienced by unskilled workers. This finding also raises questions about the effectiveness of the European Employment Strategy, which repeatedly stressed the importance of human capital and technological knowledge as main drivers for European performance.

This article tests the existence of credit constraints on higher education access by estimating actual marginal returns in the context of unobserved heterogeneity. We estimate higher education returns for those who attend to it and compare them with those of individuals who are at the margin of attending to it. Following the Carneiro and Heckman (2002) reasoning, if the returns of the latter group are larger than those of the former one we could be in presence of unobservable barriers to higher education access, such as credit constraints. We use a rich administrative database composed from three sources: data of enrollment and graduation from the Chilean higher education system, test scores and labor market outcomes from the Chilean Unemployment Insurance database. Our results suggest that, given the existing financial aid scheme, the returns for those individuals that are at the margin of attending to higher education are lower than for those who decided to attend to it. This is, no evidence of credit constraints is found for the Chilean Higher Education system. However, when conditioning on family income, we find that for the richer households some evidence of credit constraints is found.

Observationally equivalent workers are paid higher wages in larger firms. This fact is often named as the “firm-size wage gap” and is regarded as a key empirical puzzle. Using micro-level data from Turkey, we document a new stylized fact : the firm-size wage gap is more pronounced for informal (unregistered) jobs than for formal (registered) jobs. To explain this fact, we develop a two-stage wage-posting game with market imperfections and segmented markets, the solution to which produces wages as a function of firm size in a well-defined subgame-perfect equilibrium. The model proposes two explanations. First, taxes on formal employment generate a wedge between formal and informal size wage gaps. Thus, government policy can potentially affect the magnitude of the firm-size wage gaps. The second explanation features a market-based framework with strategic interactions. Relative to small firms, large firms typically post higher wages for both formal and informal jobs they open. A high-wage formal job attracts a larger pool of applicants than a high-wage informal job. The larger pool of applicants for the formal job, in turn, allows the firm to somewhat lower the initial wage offer, while this second-round effect is negligible for informal jobs. As a result, size differentials are lower in formal jobs than informal jobs. We argue that the observed patterns in the use of social connections in job search and heterogeneity in job preferences can be used to justify the validity of this second mechanism.

It is well known and widely accepted by economists that the characteristics of the countries of the European Monetary Union (EMU) created in 1999 did not match the requirements of an Optimum Currency Area (OCA). The only criteria for membership of the EMU were nominal. A strict level of convergence in inflation and interest rates was imposed. In addition to the nominal convergence, a process of convergence of nominal and real incomes in the new monetary area was expected to be generated with the monetary integration. After summarizing the criteria for a successful currency area in the context of the OCA theory, we study the real and nominal convergence process for an older group of countries (11) to establish whether or not these countries satisfy the conditions of an OCA. We apply ADF tests, together with the Schmidt-Phillips tests, and we estimate the fractional differential process to overcome the disadvantages of the traditional tests, to test for nominal and real convergence. We conclude that a process of real divergence and nominal convergence does exist, and suggest this is a source of genuine imbalance in the European integration process that can destroy the harmonious development of the European Monetary Union.http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2183‑203X_42_1