This paper investigates whether and in what sense the west German wage structure has been 'rigid' in the 1990s. To test the hypothesis that a rigid wage structure has been responsible for rising low-skilled unemployment, I propose a methodology which makes less restrictive identifying...

A growing literature is concerned with the effects of flexible workplace systems or High Performance Work Organizations (HPWOs) on wages. This paper makes use of a new employer-employee-linked panel data set for Germany to examine the effects of adopting HPWOs on wages as well as on the wage...

Even when international product market integration is taking place between fairly similar countries with low labour mobility, it may have important effects for labour markets by increasing the mobility of jobs. This creates both opportunities through exports and threats from imports. Is there...

Increased wage inequality between skilled and unskilled workers is a stylized fact, which can be observed in many developed countries. Among the explanations advanced for this phenomenon is the increasing globalization, a skill-biased technical progress, restructuring of the firms, and last but...

In simple static models, migration increases with the wage differential between host and home country. In a dynamic framework, and if migrations are temporary, the size of the migrant population in the host country depends also on the migration duration. This paper analyses optimal migration...

We present a theoretical explanation of the gender wage gap which turns on the interaction between men and women in households. In equilibria where men are over-represented in fulltime work, we show that firms rationally choose to hire women only at strictly lower wages than men. The model...

Under communism, workers had their wages set according to a centrally-determined wage grid. In this paper are used new micro data on men to estimate returns to human capital under the communist wage grid and during the transition to a market economy. There are used data from the Czech Republic...

We address the impact of education upon wage inequality by drawing on evidence from fifteen European countries, during a period ranging between 1980 and 1995. We focus on within-educational-levels wage inequality by estimating quantile regressions of Mincer equations and analysing the...