One reason to be concerned about income inequality is the idea that people not only care about their own absolute income, but also their income relative to various reference groups (e.g. co-workers, friends, neighbors, relatives, etc.). We use Canadian linked employer-employee data to estimate...

This study examines how career interruptions and subsequent wages of employees are related. Using individual panel data of middle managers from the German chemical sector, we are able to differentiate between different reasons for interruptions as well as between various compensation components....

We analyze the effect of CEO pay disclosure on wage distribution by exploiting a 1998 reform requiring Italian publicly listed companies to disclose top executives' compensation. In firms where CEOs disclose high total compensation, the top 5 percent and 1 percent of the within-firm wage...

A substantial number of studies suggests a strong relationship between education and aspects of political participation and interest. Only a small body of literature, however, addresses whether these patterns represent causal effects. We add to this research and re-examine the question in the...

This paper asks how deregulation intended to promote competition in the commercial banking industry affected the compensation structure for banking employees. Using establishment-based data from the Employment Cost Index Survey of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, I obtain measures of the...

We present evidence from a firm level experiment in which we engineered an exogenous change in managerial compensation from fixed wages to performance pay based on the average productivity of lower-tier workers. Theory suggests that managerial incentives affect both the mean and dispersion of...

This paper examines the relationship between institutions and the remuneration of different jobs by comparing the German and Belgian labour markets with respect to a typology of institutions (social representations, norms, conventions, legislation, and organisations). The observed institutional...

It is an established fact that gay men earn less than other men and lesbian women earn more than other women. In this paper we study whether differences in competitive preferences, which have emerged as a likely determinant of labour market differences between men and women, can provide a...

Making use of panel data from a survey of highly educated professionals, gender pay gaps are explored with regard to total compensation as well as to individual compensation components. The results indicate meaningful male-female wage differentials for this quite homogeneous group of people...

The wage policy of a German and a U.S. firm is comparatively analysed with a focus on the relation between wages and hierarchies. While prior studies examine only one particular firm, in this paper two plants of the same owners with similar production processes in different institutional...