Mobility of workers involves flows of labour, human capital and other production factors and thus contributes to a more efficient allocation of resources. Besides these effects on allocative efficiency, migrant flows affect relative wages and also change the international and national...

In view of rising wage and income inequality, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.50 € per hour on the basis of a microsimulation model which accounts...

This paper reviews Jacob Mincer?s contributions to the analyses of earnings and the distribution of earnings through his pioneering focus on labor market experience or on-the-job training. It begins with a brief discussion of the theoretical literature on the distribution of earnings in the...

In this paper I review what we have learned about living wage laws and their impacts on the wages, employment and poverty rates of low-wage workers. I review the characteristics of these laws and where they have been implemented to date, and what economic theory tells us about their likely...

We document dramatic rising wages in China for the period 1978-2007 based on multiple sources of aggregate statistics. Although real wages increased seven-fold during the period, growth was uneven across ownership types, industries and regions. Since the late 1990s, the wages of state-owned...

We analyze the consequences of an increase in the supply of highly educated workers on relative and real wages in a search model where wages are set by Nash-bargaining. The key insight is that an increase in the supply of highly educated workers improves the firms? outside option. As a...

This study examines the extent and influence of occupational licensing in the U.S. using a specially designed national labor force survey. Specifically, we provide new ways of measuring occupational licensing and consider what types of regulatory requirements and what level of government...

This paper studies how decentralization of wage bargaining from sector to firm-level influences wage levels and wage dispersion. We use detailed panel data covering a period of decentralization in the Danish labor market. The decentralization process provides variation in the individual worker's...

Both raw intuition and past experience suggest that the success of an employment guarantee scheme (EGS) in safeguarding the welfare of the poor depends both on the wage it promises, and the ease with which any worker can gain access. An EGS is thus at once a wage guarantee and a rationing...