We study compensation packages in family and non-family firms. Using French matched employer-employee data, we first show that family firms pay on average lower wages. We find that part of this wage gap is due to low wage workers sorting into family firms and high wage workers sorting into...

Using a linked employer-employee data set for Germany, this paper analyzes labour fluctuation and wage setting in a cohort of newly founded and other establishments from 1997 to 2001. We show empirically that start-ups tend to have higher labour turnover rates, ceteris paribus. Moreover,...

There is currently a worldwide shortage of registered nurses, driven by large shifts in both the demand for and supply of nurses. Consequently, various policies to increase the recruitment and retention of nurses are under discussion, in particular, the role that wage increases might have in...

What is the impact of raising the minimum wage on family incomes? Analysing the characteristics of low wage workers, I find that those who earn near-minimum wages are disproportionately female, unmarried and young, without post-school qualifications and overseas born. About one-third of...

Previous research on orphanhood has established that parental death has a negative effect in terms of school enrollment and grade progression, but the relation between orphanhood and socioeconomic outcomes in young adults has been largely ignored in the literature. In this paper, I use a...

The relative costs of taking employment or receiving welfare are usually understood through comparisons of a person’s social security entitlements and their wage alternative, known as replacement rates. In some situations it appears that the additional income from working is negligible, and...

The paper scrutinizes the role of wages and capital flows for competitiveness in the new EU member states in the context of real convergence. For this purpose it extends the seminal Balassa-Samuelson model by international capital markets. The augmented Balassa-Samuelson model is linked to the...

We provide the first joint evidence on the relationship between individuals' cognitive abilities, their personality and earnings for Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, we employ scores from an ultra-short IQ-test and a set of measures of personality traits, namely...

Recent studies have used quantile regression (QR) techniques to estimate the impact of education on the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. In our paper we investigate the degree to which work-related training – another important form of human capital – affects...

The paper examines the labour quality explanation of the employer size-wage gap: larger firms pay higher wages because they employ more skilled workers. Most previous studies control for unobserved skills of workers using longitudinal data and the fixed effects estimator thus relying on a...