This paper analyzes the allocation of workers to jobs and the wage distribution in Germany. Our main contribution is to reconcile prominent empirical models of wage dispersion (Abowd et al., 1999; Card et al., 2013) with theoretical sorting models (Shimer and Smith, 2000; Eeckhout and Kircher, 2011;...

German social security records involve an indicator for part-time or full-time work. In 2011, the reporting procedure was changed suggesting that a fraction of worker recorded to be working full-time before the change were in fact part-time workers. This study develops a correction based on...

German social security records involve an indicator for part-time or full-time work. In 2011, the reporting procedure was changed suggesting that a fraction of worker recorded to be working full-time before the change were in fact part-time workers. This study develops a correction based on...

Suppose insiders use their market power to push up their wages, while entrants receive their reservation wages. How will employment be affected? In addressing this question, we focus on the role of on-the-job training. We show that an insider wage hike reduces recession-time employment but, in...

This paper analyzes the relationship between aggregate wages and individual wages when there is time series variation in employment and in the dispersion of wages. A new and easily implementable framework for the empirical analysis of aggregation biases is developed. Aggregate real wages are...

Using Difference-in-Differences estimation and data from the European Community Household Panel, this paper suggests that the fixed exchange-rate policy adopted by Italy in the 1997-2000 period has reduced the real hourly wage growth of Italian fulltime workers with permanent contracts, on...

A model linking macroeconomic phenomena and income distribution in balanced growth equilibria is developed as a variant to the Kaldor model of factor shares. It departs from the original Kaldor model in assuming equal savings rates and production determined by a matching process between workers...

Composition bias in aggregate wages is often a scapegoat for the apparent unresponsiveness of wages over the cycle. Since Bils (1985) and in particular Solon et al. (1994), who find that that real wages are highly pro-cyclical a general consensus has emerged that the observed 'mild' cyclicality...

We show that two models of the labor market, a Walrasian model and a labor contracting model, both have an approximate dynamic factor structure. We use this result to motivate our empirical approach to estimating the cyclical properties of real wages, which does not impose any structure between...

Low-skilled workers are concentrated in sectors that experience fast productivity growth and yet their real wages have been stagnating. We document evidence from the U.S. to show the importance of sectoral reallocations. Key to our two-sector model is the fall in the relative price of the...