At the start of the German unification process it was a commonly held view that east German living conditions will converge to west Geman levels within a few years. This view was not only held by notoriously optimistic politicians but also by a great many of professional economists. With...

This paper investigates whether the workforce in Brazil is geographically segmented by analyzing variation in workers' earnings. It finds that standard market explanatlons for regional wage disparities, such as variations in the cost of living or workforce quality, can explaln only a part of the...

We argue that in labor markets with central wage bargaining wage flexibility varies systematically across the wage distribution: local wage flexibility is more relevant for the upper part of the wage distribution, and flexibility of wages negotiated under central wage bargaining affects the...