We use a unique data set about the wage distribution that Swiss students expect for themselves ex ante, deriving parametric and non-parametric measures to capture expected wage risk. These wage risk measures are unfettered by heterogeneity which handicapped the use of actual market wage...

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...

We examine theoretically and empirically the properties of the equilibrium wage function and its implications for policy. Our emphasis is on how the researcher approaches economic and policy questions when there is labor market heterogeneity leading to a set of wages. We focus on the application...

We study the welfare effects of earnings testing flat-rate old-age benefits in a quantitative overlapping generations model with idiosyncratic labor income risk. In our model economy, even a moderate earnings testing reduces individuals' expected lifetime utility, whenever other taxes are taken...

This chapter reviews the economics literature on immigrant-native differentials in occupational risk. It begins by briefly explaining the theory of compensating wage differentials. It then provides a more detailed discussion of the empirical evidence on the subject, which reaches several...

This paper shows that job mobility is a valuable channel which employed workers use to mitigate bad labor market shocks. I construct and estimate a model of wage dynamics jointly with a dynamic model of job mobility. The key feature of the model is the specification of wage shocks at the worker-...

Microeconomic theory predicts that under certain regularity conditions higher idiosyncratic risk increases the propensity to insure against independent marketable risks. We apply these predictions to the specific case of labor income risk and car insurance using data from the UK. The main...

This paper uses annual data drawn from the GSOEP to estimate individual earnings risk (labor market risk) in Germany for the period 1983-2012. The econometric specification of the earnings process allows for transitory shocks and permanent shocks to individual earnings. We find that both the...