One explanation advanced for the persistent gender pay differences in labor markets is that women avoid salary negotiations. By using a natural field experiment that randomizes nearly 2,500 job-seekers into jobs that vary important details of the labor contract, we are able to observe both the...

Matched employer-employee data exhibits both wage and productivity dispersion across firms and suggest that a linear relationship holds between the average wage paid and a firm productivity. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that these facts can be explained by a search and matching...

The returns to talent or performance have grown over time in developed countries. Is talent concentrated in a few firms or are firms virtual microcosms of the economy, each having close to identical distributions of talent?The data show that talent is not concentrated in a few companies, but is...

This paper consists of three parts. First, we briefly describe some key features of the labor market in Denmark, some of which contribute to the Danish labor markets behaving quite differently from those in many other European countries. The next two parts exploit detailed linked...

This paper reveals that municipal police departments are much less likely to strike in states that have collective bargaining laws than in states with no police bargaining law or when police bargaining has been outlawed. Unlike previous research which has used the state as the unit of...

In countries where wages are primarily set by collective bargaining, the effects on unemployment of changes in the economic environment depend crucially on the speed of learning of unions. This speed of learning is likely to depend in turn on the quality of the dialogue that unions have with...

Despite stringent dismissal restrictions in most European countries, rates of job creation and destruction are remarkably similar across European and North American labor markets. This paper shows that relative-wage compression is conducive to higher employer-initiated job turnover, and argues...

In most European countries, the prevailing terms of employment, including the nominal wage, can only be changed by mutual consent. I show that this feature implies that workers have a strategic advantage in the wage negotiations when they try to prevent a cut in nominal wages. If inflation is so...

While changes in the demand for skilled labor appear to have led to a widening of the wage structures in many countries during the 198Os,considerable differences in the level of wage inequality remain. In this paper, we examine the sources of these differences, focusing primarily on explaining...