To what extent do different firms follow different wage policies? How do such policies affect worker mobility between firms, and what are the effects of different wage bargaining regimes? The empirical branch of personnel economics has long been hampered by a lack of representative data sets....

Job reallocation is considered to be a key characteristic of well-functioning labor markets, as more productive firms grow and less productive ones contract or close. However, despite its potential benefits for the economy, there are significant costs that are borne by displaced workers. We...

We analyze changes in the gender structure at the top of the earnings distribution in the United States over the last 30 years using a 10% sample of individual earnings histories from the Social Security Administration. Despite making large inroads, females still constitute a small proportion of...

This paper studies the cyclical nature of individual income risk using a confidential dataset from the U.S. Social Security Administration, which contains (uncapped) earnings histories for millions of individuals. The base sample is a nationally representative panel containing 10 percent of all...

In this paper we reassess the evidence on labor income risk. There are two leading views on the nature of the income process in the current literature. The first view, which we call the "Restricted Income Profiles" (RIP) process, holds that individuals are subject to large and very persistent...

Wage inequality has been significantly higher in the United States than in continental European countries (CEU) since the 1970s. Moreover, this inequality gap has further widened during this period as the US has experienced a large increase in wage inequality, whereas the CEU has seen only...

In this paper we present an analytically tractable overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation, and study its implications for the evolution of the U.S. wage distribution from 1970 to 2000. The key feature of the model, and the only source of heterogeneity, is that individuals...

There has been a remarkable increase in wage inequality in the US, UK and many other countries over the past three decades. A significant part of this appears to be within observable groups (such as age-gender-skill cells). A generally untested implication of many theories rationalizing the...

This paper examines gender differences in labor market outcomes for hard-to-employ youth in the US and West Germany during the 1984-91 period. We find that young, less educated American men and especially women are far less likely to be employed than their German counterparts. Moreover, less...

The U.S labor market experienced two dramatic developments over the past twenty years: a falling male-female pay gap and a rising level of wage inequality. This paper uses Michigan Panel Study on Income Dynamics (PSID) data for 1975 and 1987 and Current Population Survey (CPS) data for 1971 and...