We find that oil supply shocks decrease average real wages, particularly skilled wages, and increase wage dispersion across regions, particularly unskilled wage dispersion. In a model with spatial energy intensity differences and nontradables, labor demand shifts, while explaining the response...

This paper develops a sufficient statistics approach for estimating the role of search frictions in wage dispersion and lifecycle wage growth. We show how the wage dynamics of displaced workers are directly informative of both for a large class of search models. Specifically, the correlation...

This paper analyzes the allocation of workers to jobs and the wage distribution in Germany. Our main contribution is to reconcile prominent empirical models of wage dispersion (Abowd et al., 1999; Card et al., 2013) with theoretical sorting models (Shimer and Smith, 2000; Eeckhout and Kircher, 2011;...

Immigrants in many countries have lower employment rates and lower earnings than natives. We study whether a more liberal access to citizenship improves the economic integration of immigrants. Our analysis relies on two major immigration reforms in Germany, a country with a weak record of...

We relate origin-destination real price differences to immigrants' reservation wages and their career trajectories, exploiting administrative data from Germany and the 2004 enlargement of the European Union. We find that immigrants who enter Germany when a unit of earnings from Germany allows...

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are...

Recent empirical studies document that the distribution of earnings changes displays substantial deviations from lognormality: in particular, earnings changes are negatively skewed with extremely high kurtosis (long and thick tails), and these non-Gaussian features vary substantially both over...

The canonical supply-demand model of the wage returns to skill has been extremely influential; however, it has faced several important challenges. Several studies show that the standard approach sometimes produces theoretically wrong-signed elasticities of substitution, yields counterintuitive...

In many developing economies rate of unemployment is increasing with skill accumulation and thereby leading to underemployment. Our paper offers to look at skill formation as a demand side problem not as a traditional supply side problem and also how skill formation or education affects...

A well-established stylised fact is that employer provided job-related training raises productivity and wages. Using UK data, we further find that job-related training is positively related to subsidies aimed at reducing training costs for employers. We also find that there is a positive, albeit...