Performance pay in general amounts to only a small fraction of total pay. In this paper, we show that performance pay is nevertheless important for the level and dynamics of wages over the life cycle because of the incentives it indirectly provides for human capital acquisition and because of...

Recent research concludes that wage returns to cognitive skills have declined in the U.S. We reassess this finding. Using decomposition methods, we document the pivotal role played by dynamic shifts in the distributions of pre-labor market cognitive skills. Our findings show these shifts explain...

We use the labor market for doctorates in the biomedical sciences, where career dislocation is common, as a case study of skill-task mismatch and its consequences. Using longitudinal, worker-level data on biomedical doctorates, we investigate mismatch as an explanation for the negative pecuniary...

Is government guiding the invisible hand at the top of the labor market? We use new administrative data to measure physicians' earnings and estimate the influence of healthcare policies on these earnings, physicians' labor supply, and allocation of talent. Combining the administrative registry...

Investment fund managers make asset allocation decisions on behalf of a significant segment of US households. To elucidate the incentives they operate under, as well as the income and career risks they face, we construct a unique and novel dataset, which encompasses detailed information on the...

The paper explains how a country can fall into a quot;low-skill, bad-job trap,quot; in which workers acquire insufficient training and firms provide insufficient skilled vacancies. In particular, the paper argues that in countries where a large proportion of the workforce is unskilled, firms...

We evaluate empirically the impact of the dramatic 1991 trade liberalization in India on the industry wage structure. The empirical strategy uses variation in industry wage premiums and trade policy across industries and over time. In contrast to earlier studies on developing countries, we find...

Nominal wage growth in most advanced economies remains markedly lower than it was before the Great Recession of 2008-09. This paper finds that the bulk of the wage slowdown is accounted for by labor market slack, inflation expectations, and trend productivity growth. In particular, there appears...

Brazil's public-sector wage bill is comparatively high. It grows inertially and competeswith other spending. Rightsizing the wage bill could stimulate administrative efficiencyand bring more equity into a system where public employees earn more than private incomparable professions. Most...

Since the global financial crisis, US wage growth has been sluggish. Drawing on individual earnings data from the 2000-15 Current Population Survey, I find that the drawn-out cyclical labor market repair - likely owing to low entry wages of new workers - slowed down real wage growth. There are,...