The closing of the gender wage gap is an ongoing phenomenon in industrialized countries. However, research has been limited in its ability to understand the causes of these changes, due in part to an inability to directly compare the work of women to that of men. In this study, we use a new...

In a large German bakery chain, many workers report negative perceptions of monitoring via checklists. We survey workers and managers about the value and time costs to all in-store checklists, leading the firm to randomly remove two of the most perceivedly time-consuming and low-value checklists...

Since the early 1980s, the U.S. economy has experienced a growing wage differential: high-skilled workers have claimed an increasing share of available income, while low-skilled workers have seen an absolute decline in real wages. How and why this disparity has arisen is a matter of ongoing...

For recently released prisoners, the minimum wage and the availability of state Earned Income Tax Credits (EITCs) can influence both their ability to find employment and their potential legal wages relative to illegal sources of income, in turn affecting the probability they return to prison....

We describe the economic history of the rise of the American minimum wage between 1910 and 1968. Each new FLSA amendment led to a new peak in the real purchasing power of the national minimum. Exemptions to the FLSA were progressively closed and the share of workers covered finally increased...

We model and analyze employer cartels that fix wages by committing to a wage ceiling. The setting is a frictional labor market with large employers that compete for workers via posted wages. Wage fixing reduces competition both inside and outside the cartel, leading to market-wide wage...

Using data from 17 OECD countries over the 1960-96 period, we investigate the impact of institutions on the relative employment of youth, women, and older individuals. Theoretically, we show that labor market institutions meant to improve workers' income share imply larger disemployment effects...

This paper applies principles from evolutionary biology to the study of unions. We show that unions which maximize the present discounted wages of current members will be displaced in evolutionary competition by unions with more moderate wage policies that allow their firms to live longer. This...

A political miracle occurred when Germany was reunited, and at first glance an economic miracle has followed. Real incomes in the east have now reached the western level, and investment per capita has been much higher than in the west. However, every third deutschmark spent in the east has been...

The paper develops a simple stochastic new open economy macroeconomic model based on sticky nominal wages. Explicit solution of the wage-setting problem under uncertainty allows one to analyze the effects of the monetary regime on welfare, expected output, and the expected terms of trade....