Different empirical studies suggest that the structure of employment in the U.S. and Great Britain tends to polarise into "good" and "bad" jobs. We provide updated evidence that polarisation also occurred in Germany since the mid-1980s until 2008. Using representative panel data, we show that...

Labour economists typically assume that pay differences between occupations can be explained with variations in productivity. The empirical evidence on the validity of this assumption is surprisingly thin and subject to various potential biases. The authors use matched employer-employee panel...

The authors use matched employer-employee panel data on Belgian private-sector firms to estimate the relationship between wage/productivity differentials and the firm's labor composition in terms of part-time and sex. Findings suggest that the groups of women and part-timers generate employer...

This paper analyses the wage effects of educational mismatch by workers' origin using a sizeable, detailed matched employer-employee dataset for Belgium. Relying on a fine-grained approach to measuring educational mismatch, the results show that over-educated workers, regardless of their origin,...

As immigrants born in developing countries and their descendants represent a growing share of the working-age population in the developed world, their labour market integration constitutes a key factor for fostering economic development and social cohesion. Using a granular, matched...

The paper explores the link between different institutional features of minimum wage systems and the minimum wage bite. We notably address the striking absence of studies on sectoral-level minima and exploit unique data covering 17 European countries and information from more than 1100...

This paper explores how the diversity of minimum wage systems affects earnings inequalities within European countries. It relies on the combination of (a) harmonized micro-data from household surveys, (b) data on national statutory minimum wages and coverage rates, and (c) hand-collected...

This paper is the first to investigate the role of firm-level upstreamness (i.e. the number of steps before the production of a firm meets final demand) in explaining wage differences according to workers' origin. Using unique linked employer-employee data relative to the Belgian manufacturing...

We provide first evidence regarding the direct impact of educational mismatch on firm productivity. To do so, we rely on representative linked employer-employee panel data for Belgium covering the period 1999-2006. Controlling for simultaneity issues, time-invariant unobserved workplace...

This paper is among the firsts to investigate the impact of overeducation and overskilling on workers' wages using a unique pan-European database covering twenty-eight countries for the year 2014, namely the CEDEFOP's European Skills and Jobs (ESJ) survey. Overall, the results suggest a wage...