The vast majority of existing studies that estimate the average unexplained gender pay gap use unnecessarily restrictive linear versions of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition. Using a notably rich and large data set of 1.7 million employees in Switzerland, we investigate how the methodological...

Using matched employer-employee-contract data for Portugal – a country with near-universal union coverage – we find evidence of a sizable effect of union affiliation on wages. Gelbach's (2016) decomposition procedure is next deployed to ascertain the contributions of worker, firm, match, and...

Using rich linked employer-employee data for (West) Germany between 1996 and 2014, we analyze the most important drivers of the recent rise in German wage dispersion and pin down the relative contribution of plant and worker characteristics. Moreover, we separately investigate the drivers of...

Wages grow and become more unequal as workers age. Economic theory focuses on worker investment in human capital, search for employers, and residual wage shocks to account for these life cycle wage dynamics. We highlight the importance of jobs: collections of tasks and duties defined by...

The skill premium has increased significantly in the United States in the last five decades. During the same period, individual wage risk has also increased. This paper proposes a mechanism through which a rise in wage risk increases the skill premium. Intuitively, a rise in uninsured wage risk...

We use surveys, laboratory experiments and administrative labor-market data to study howheterogeneity in the perceived immorality of work and in workers' aversion to acting immorallyinteract to impact labor market outcomes. Specifically, we investigate whether those individualsleast concerned...