We analyze how quits responded to arbitrary differences in own and peer wages using an unusual feature of a pay raise at a large U.S. retailer. The firm's use of discrete pay steps created discontinuities in raises, where workers earning within 1 cent of each other received new wages that...

Around 40% of the male workforce regularly works 8 to 9 hours a week of paid overtime. This paper investigates the determinants of overtime hours in Britain over the period 1975-1999. For this purpose a panel data Tobit model is estimated using the very large panel of employees from the National...

We study the long-run effects of initial labor market conditions on wages for a large sample of male individuals entering the Austrian labor market between 1978 and 2000. We find a robust negative effect of unfavorable entry conditions on starting wages. This initial effect turns out to be quite...

We estimate the effects of labor market entry conditions on wages for male individuals first entering the Austrian labor market between 1978 and 2000. We find a large negative effect of unfavorable entry conditions on starting wages as well as a sizeable negative long-run effect. Specifically,...

This paper analyzes how the labor market adjusts to the Great Recession. To this aim, we use the data for Latvia, a country that has experienced one of the most severe recessions in Europe and a subsequent remarkable recovery. Employing longitudinal EU SILC data and a panel data set constructed...

Using harmonized micro data, this paper investigates the effects of the early phase (2008-10) of the recent economic crisis on transitions between labour market states in Europe. Our analysis focuses on individual heterogeneity, on the type of employment contract, and on cross-country...

We propose a simple test that uses information on workers' mobility, wages and firms' profits to identify the sign and strength of assortative matching. The basic intuition underlying our empirical strategy is that, in the presence of positive (negative) assortative matching, good workers are...

In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive view of the unemployment dynamics generated by different structural shocks. We show that the relative contribution of the job finding and separation rates to the unemployment dynamics depends on a type of structural shocks. Identified using a sign...

Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage. In particular, low-paid workers underestimate wages elsewhere. We document this anchoring bias by eliciting workers' beliefs in a representative survey in Germany and comparing them to measures of actual outside...

This paper studies the mechanisms driving the persistently high unemployment rate during the last recession and mild recovery. Previous studies have examined the demographic aspect of the recession. We focus on specific industries. Consequently, we propose a methodology to decompose changes in...