This paper addresses the question of why high unemployment rates tend to persist even after their proximate causes have been reversed (e.g., after wages relative to productivity have fallen). We suggest that the longer people are unemployed, the greater is their cumulative likelihood of falling...

We present evidence for the motherhood wage penalty in Spain as a representative Southern European Mediterranean country. We use the European Community Household Panel (ECHP, 1994-2001) to estimate, from both pool and fixed-effects methods, a wage equation in terms of observed variables and...

Can public policy interfere with culture, such as beliefs and norms of cooperation? We investigate his question by evaluating the interactions between the State and the Civil Society, focusing on the labor market. International data shows a negative correlation between union density and the...

Recent research in economics suggests a positive association between self-esteem and earnings. A major problem in this literature is that from simple cross-sectional wage regressions it is not possible to conclude that self-esteem has a causal impact on earnings. While classical measurement...

This paper examines changes in the wage structure in urban India during the past two decades (1983-2004) across the entire wage distribution using the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition approach. Real wages increased throughout the wage distribution during 1983-1993; however, it increased only in...

In this paper I want to shed light on two aspects of income mobility: relative total income mobility using the estimator by Fields and Ok [1999] and equalization of long-run incomes measured by the index of Fields [2004]. The cross country comparison shows a negative relationship between total...

Previous studies have found evidence of a self-serving bias in bargaining and dispute resolution. We use experimental data to test for this effect in a simulated labor relatonship. We find a consistent discrepancy between employer beliefs and employee actions that can only be attributed to...

Both common macroeconomic shocks and country-specific developments have subjected the flexibility of wage setting mechanisms in the euro area to a stress test in recent years. Against this background, this paper takes a fresh look at wage flexibility in EMU and attempts to draw a few lessons...

Economists have long been studying the shares of labour and capital in income. Surprisingly, no such empirical studies exist for Australia. This paper looks at a number of variables that can affect labour’s share in income: unemployment, capacity utilisation, growth rate of GDP and changes in...

Tipping is a significant economic activity (tips in the US food industry alone amount to about $42 billion annually) that was claimed to improve service quality and increase economic efficiency, because it gives incentives to provide excellent service, and therefore allows to avoid costly...