Quality of life differences across areas can be measured by differences in “real wages”, where real wages are computed as nominal wages adjusted for the cost of living. Computing cost of living differences involves several important issues, including how housing prices should be measured....

This paper uses a two country trade and geography model of monopolistic competition to study the effects of wage policies and social policies on the location of industry. It is first shown that a union wage push in one of two otherwise identical countries induces a relocation of firms which...

Inequality has increased considerably in many Western countries over the past decades. When dealing with economic inequality as a research subject the question "inequality of what among whom" arises. Analyses of inequality are typically concerned with the distribution of wages, earnings or...

This paper provides a cross-country comparison of life-cycle and business-cycle fluctuations in the dispersion of household-level wage innovations. We draw our inference from household panel data sets for the US, the UK, and Germany. First, we find that household characteristics explain about...

The potential failure of national industry agreements to take into account productivity levels of least productive regions has been considered as one of the causes of regional unemployment in European countries. Two solutions are generally proposed: the first, encouraged by the European...

We apply an innovative technique to allow for differential effects of physical appearance and self-confidence across the wage distribution, as traditional methods can confound opposing effects at either end of the wage distribution. Comparing the effects of beauty and confidence measures in two...

This paper analyzes the impact of workplace characteristics on individual wages based on a unique cross-section matched employer-employee dataset for the Israeli private manufacturing sector in 1995; especially, we examine the effects of the interaction between rent-sharing and wages on the gender...