The purpose of this paper is to sort out firm-related differences from effects that result from different economic structures. A non-parametric decomposition is used to analyse firm level difference between the wage spread in the two major regions of unified Germany. If firm-specific effects...

East German wages have been below the West German wage level since unification. Moreover, the East-West wage gap implied by the contractual wages specified in collective wage agreements is drifting ever further apart from the wage gap in terms of effective wages. This paper looks at the role of...

Using individual level data from Turkstat Household Labor Force Survey for 2005-2009 period and a variety of parametric and semi-parametric techniques, we test two hypothesis regarding formal and informal labor markets: whether there is a wage gap between formal and informal workers and whether...

Wages have been spreading out across workers over time - or in other words, the 90th/50th wage ratio has risen over time. A key question is, has the productivity distribution also spread out across worker skill levels over time? Using our calculations of productivity by skill level for the U.S.,...

In this paper we develop procedures for performing inference in regression models about how potential policy interventions affect the entire marginal distribution of an outcome of interest. These policy interventions consist of either changes in the distribution of covariates related to the...

This paper extends the method of local instrumental variables developed by Heckman and Vytlacil (1999, 2001, 2005) to the estimation of not only means, but also distributions of potential outcomes. The newly developed method is illustrated by applying it to changes in college enrollment and wage...

While productivity growth in electricity generation is associated with multiple positive effects from an economic and environmental perspective, measuring it is challenging. This paper proposes a framework to estimate and decompose productivity growth for a sector characterized by multiple...

This paper describes a non-parametric, unconditional, hyperbolic quantile estimator that unlike traditional non-parametric frontier estimators is both robust to data outliers and has a root-n convergence rate. We use this estimator to examine changes in the efficiency and productivity of U.S....

This paper discusses the endeavours of policy makers to come to some degree of wage coordination among EU countries, aiming at aligning wage growth with labour productivity growth at the national levels. In this context, we analyse the wage and productivity developments in Germany, the European...

We develop an empirical framework to assess the importance of trade and technical change on the wages of production and non-production workers. Trade is measured by the foreign outsourcing of intermediate inputs, while technical change is measured by the shift towards high-technology capital...