In the absence of closed-shops and discriminatory wage policies, union membership can be explained by the existence of social norms. We develop a theoretical frame-work which nests various social custom models. Using micro data for Germany and Great Britain, we find evidence for social custom...

There is by now a lot of evidence showing a sharp increase in cross-sectional wage and earnings inequality during the 2000s in Germany. Our study is the first to decompose this cross-sectional variance into its permanent and transitory parts for years beyond 2000. Using data from the German...

Models in which employers learn about the productivity of young workers, such as Altonji and Pierret (2001), have two principal implications: First, the distribution of wages becomes more dispersed as a cohort of workers gains experience; second, the coefficient on a variable that employers...

Several empirical minimum wage studies have recently been published that simulate employment effects of a federal minimum wage in Germany. We disentangle various factors that explain the variation in previous simulation results. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the newly...

Although there are a variety of studies on the gender pay gap, only a few relate to managerial positions. The present study attempts to fill this gap. Managers in private companies in Germany are a highly selective group of women and men, who differ only marginally in their human capital...

The study analyses the gender pay gap in private-sector management positions in Germany based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the years 2001-2008. It focuses in particular on gender segregation in the labor market, that is, on the unequal distribution of women and...

This paper examines the changes in the inter-industry wage structure experienced by Russia since 1993, as part of its transition from a plan-based economy to a more "market oriented" structure. Using two Russian household panel data sets, the RLMS and the RUSSET, we find that since the...

Our paper investigates the link between international outsourcing and wages utilising a large household panel and combining it with industry level information on industries' outsourcing activities from input-output tables. By doing so we can arguably overcome the potential aggregation bias as...