Models in which employers learn about the productivity of young workers, such as Altonji and Pierret (2001), have two principal implications: First, the distribution of wages becomes more dispersed as a cohort of workers gains experience; second, the coefficient on a variable that employers...

There is by now a lot of evidence showing a sharp increase in cross-sectional wage and earnings inequality during the 2000s in Germany. Our study is the first to decompose this cross-sectional variance into its permanent and transitory parts for years beyond 2000. Using data from the German...

How individual wages change with time, and how they are expected to change as individuals grow older, is one of crucial determinants of their behaviour on the labour market including their decision to retire. The profile of individual hourly wages has for a long time been assumed to follow an...

Whereas the number of paid overtime hours declined over the last two decades in Germany, a different trend can be observed for unpaid overtime. We analyze future consequences of unpaid work with respect to a worker's career advancement, such as higher future wages and probabilities of promotion...

This paper explores the determinants of individual well-being as measured by self-reported levels of satisfaction with income. Making full use of the panel data nature of the German Socio-Economic Panel, we provide empirical evidence for well-being depending on absolute and on relative levels of...

We propose a generalized estimating equations approach to the analysis of the mean and the covariance structure of a bivariate time series process of panel data with mixed continuous and discrete dependent variables. The approach is used to jointly analyze wage dynamics and the incidence of...

Why do people work unpaid overtime? We show that remarkable long-term labor earnings gains are associated with unpaid overtime in West Germany. A descriptive analysis suggests that over a 10-year period workers with unpaid overtime experience on average at least a 10 percentage points higher...

In the 2008 Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) Pretest, the factorial survey method was tested for the first time for use in the SOEP longitudinal study. In this paper, we describe the construction and application of the vignette module, which has its origins in the field of justice research and...

The aggregate average wage is often used as an indicator of economic performance and welfare, and as such often serves as a benchmark for changes in the generosity of public transfers and for wage negotiations. Yet if economies experience a high degree of (nonrandom) fluctuation in employment...

Using unique personnel data from one Russian firm for the years 1997 to 2002 we study the size, development and determinants of the gender earnings gap in an internal labor market during late transition. The gap is sizable but declines strongly over the entire period. Gender earnings...