I develop measures of firm-level pay disparity and examine their relation to firm performance. Using comprehensive compensation data for a large sample of firms, I find no statistically significant relation between the ratio of CEO-to-mean employee compensation and performance. I next create...

Wage inequality between individuals has changed little in Japan in recent times unlike in other developed countries. We examine changes in wage inequality within and between establishments during the prolonged stagnation period in Japan. Using a micro-level worker-establishment dataset from 1991...

The paper uses novel data for Germany linking worker and establishment surveys with administrative social security data for all workers in the surveyed establishments. From these data, four variables are generated that describe a firm's wage structure and the positions of workers within it: (a)...

We analyze the effect of CEO pay disclosure on wage distribution by exploiting a 1998 reform requiring Italian publicly listed companies to disclose top executives' compensation. In firms where CEOs disclose high total compensation, the top 5 percent and 1 percent of the within-firm wage...

In this paper, we propose a new comprehensive framework for analysing wage discrimination. This framework assesses wage discrimination on the grounds of conditional wage distributions (rather than just conditional means), regards the whole population (rather than just those in work) and employs...

Finance is a vital ingredient for economic growth, but there can also be too much of it. This study investigates what fifty years of data for OECD countries have to say about the role of the financial sector for economic growth and income inequality and draws policy implications. Over the past...

Public questioning about the role of finance has been fuelled by the perception that financial sector pay is an important factor behind high economic inequalities. This paper is the first to provide a comprehensive look at the level of earnings in finance and the implications for labour income...

This paper investigates how much of the difference in wage distributions is related to differences in skill distributions and whether a compressed wage distribution is associated with high unemployment across core OECD countries. Some countries that have more compressed (dispersed) wage...

Policymakers in many OECD countries are increasingly concerned about high and rising inequality. Much of the evidence (as far back as Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations) points to the importance of skills in tackling wage inequality. Yet a recent strand of the research argues that (cognitive)...

We employ the German social security register data to analyze the development of wage inequality among foreigners in Germany. The data show a sharp increase of wage inequality which exceeds the size observed for natives. The decomposition methods proposed by DiNardo et al. (1996) are employed to...