We allow for differential effects of physical appearance across the wage distribution using a technique traditionally used in the finance literature. We find an average beauty premium of 2%–4% for women, which is concentrated at the bottom of the wage distribution. The average beauty premium...

This paper studies the cyclicality of aggregate real wages in Japan. By using both static and dynamic approaches, I measure comovements between real wages and business cycle indicators. This paper finds that while real wages constructed using the consumer price index and the GDP deflator are...

Within the context of a product variety model, this paper examines the impact of outsourcing of skill-intensive tasks on the skilled–unskilled wage gap. Outsourcing affects the wage gap through direct as well as indirect channels. While outsourcing decreases the effective wage of skilled...

We argue that the intensity of competition within a group or organization can have an important influence on whether or not people cheat. To make this point we first work through a simple model of strategic misreporting in the workplace. For low and high levels of competition we show that, in...

Limited Mobility Bias explains why positive assortative matching is not observed in the empirical literature. Using German social security records, we estimate the correlation between worker and firm contributions to wage equations and find that it is unambiguously positive.

Difference-in-differences estimates of the effects of the September 11th attacks on labour market outcomes of Muslims are generated using 2001 and 2006 Canadian Census data. Little evidence of negative, significant impacts on employment, hours, weeks-worked or wages is found.

Evidence from US data suggests that increases in parental education significantly steepen the slope of male experience–earnings profiles during early career years, other things equal.

Is there an obesity externality? In the late 1990s and early 2000s, many state governments began requiring health insurance plans to cover treatments for diabetes. Using difference-in-difference analysis of restricted geocode data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to compare...

We document a strong trend towards more positive assortative wage sorting using Danish Matched Employer–Employee data from 1980 to 2006. The pattern is not due to compositional changes in the labor market and primarily occurs among high wage workers.

This paper investigates how to test for nonresponse selection bias in wage functions induced by missing income information. We suggest an “easy-to-implement” approach which requires information on interviewer IDs and the interview date rather than hard-to-get interviewer characteristics.