This paper uses microeconomic data for the period from 1990 to 2004 to examine the relationship between public–private sector wage differentials and labour market conditions in Finland. The results show that the public sector wage premium is strongly counter-cyclical. On average, a 10 percent...

On their intensive margins, firms in the British engineering industry adjusted to the severe falls in demand during the 1930s Depression by cutting hours of work. This provided an important means of reducing labour input and marginal labour costs, through movements from overtime to short-time...

Utilizing a large dataset of U.S. federal government employees covering 24 years, we estimate and analyze the persistent wage effect of entering government employment during recessions for recent college graduates and other new employees. Contrary to previous results in the literature for...

Utilizing registry data for all Norwegian males born in 1959-1973, I demonstrate that local unemployment rates at the typical age of graduation from compulsory school (age 16) and highschool (age 19) have persistent, negative effects on males' earnings, employment, and disability pension...

Using administrative data from Germany, this paper analyzes the relation between wages and past and current labor market conditions. Specifically, it explores whether the data is more consistent with implicit contract models (Beaudry/DiNardo, 1991) or a matching model with on-the-job search and...

We study the impact of graduating in a recession in Flanders (Belgium), i.e. in a rigid labor market. In the presence of a high minimum wage, a typical recession hardly influences the hourly wage of low educated men, but reduces working time and earnings by about 4.5% up to twelve years after...

Using administrative employer-employee data from Germany, we investigate the relationship between wages and past and present labor market conditions. Furthermore, we revisit recent findings of greater wage cyclicality of new hires. Overall, we find strong evidence for history dependent wages,...

This paper investigates the long-term effects of initial labor market conditions by comparing cohorts who graduated from college before, during, and after the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis. We measure the overall welfare impact by examining not only labor market activities but also family...

This paper analyzes the effects of entry labor-market conditions on workers' career in Spain, a country well known for its highly segmented labor market and rigid labor-market institutions. In contrast with more flexible labor markets, we find that the annual earnings losses of individuals...