A number of important jurisdictions have recently enacted salary history bans to combat the gender pay gap. This paper models the effect of such bans by augmenting the standard asymmetric learning setting with efficiency wages, such that wages themselves are both necessary to motivate optimal...

We exploit a spatial discontinuity in the wages paid by the United Kingdom's National Health Service to examine how wages affect the duration of time a vacancy is advertised. NHS workers in inner London are mandated by law to be paid an extra 4.3% more than those who work in outer London. We use...

Three fundamental forces have shaped labor markets over the last 50 years: the secular increase in the returns to education, educational upgrading, and the integration of large numbers of women into the workforce. We modify the Katz and Murphy (1992) framework to predict the structure of the...

We study how idiosyncratic earnings risk evolves over the business cycle in Italy and in the US. We distinguish between two sources of risk to annual earnings growth: changes in employment time (number of weeks of employment within a year) and changes in weekly earnings. Shocks to employment...

I have worried about the talk, in recent times, that immigrants hurt the wages of native workers in the host nation. If so, that is not a good outcome. Why should native workers lose out to immigrants? To come to terms with my worry, I began to experiment with a classic dataset on immigrants and...

I study the effects of US salary history bans which restrict employers from inquiring about job applicants’ pay history during the hiring process, but allow candidates to voluntarily share information. Using a difference-in-differences design, I show that these policies narrowed the gender pay...

A citywide minimum wage for all hotels in the City of Los Angeles with 100 or more rooms would impact approximately 64 of the city's 87 large hotels and over five thousand low-wage hotel workers. A new minimum wage will not result in significant relocation or cessation of current hotel business....

In this paper we examine the impact of rises in inactivity on wages in the US economy and find evidence of a statistically significant negative effect. These nonparticipants exert additional downward pressure on wages over and above the impact of the unemployment rate itself. This pattern holds...

We estimate the earnings losses of a cohort of workers displaced during the Great Recession and decompose those long-term losses into components attributable to fewer work hours and to reduced hourly wage rates. We also examine the extent to which the reduced earnings, work hours, and wages of...

We estimate the earnings losses of a cohort of workers displaced during the Great Recession and decompose those long-term losses into components attributable to fewer work hours and to reduced hourly wage rates. We also examine the extent to which the reduced earnings, work hours, and wages of...