One reason to be concerned about income inequality is the idea that people not only care about their own absolute income, but also their income relative to various reference groups (e.g. co-workers, friends, neighbors, relatives, etc.). We use Canadian linked employer-employee data to estimate...

In this lecture I first give an explanation for invidious preferences based on the (evolutionary) competition for resources. Then I show that these preferences have wide ranging and empirically relevant effects on labor markets, such as: workplace skill segregation, gradual promotions, wage...

This paper studies the impact of exam luck on individuals’ education and labor market success. We leverage unique features of the Norwegian education system that produce random variation in the content of the exams taken by students at the end of high school. Lucky students take exams in...

In this paper we analyze the behavioral consequences of transparent wage distributions on workers' motivation. We study a simple gift-exchange game with one principal and three agents in two different treatments. In the first treatment, agents are not informed about their co-workers' wages and...

Do exporters and foreign-controlled establishments pay their workers higher wages than non-exporters and domestic-controlled establishments? This paper draws on an employer-employee dataset to explore the existence of exporter and foreign-controlled wage premiums in the Canadian manufacturing...

In this paper we develop a North-South trade model in which the South produces food and the North produces both food and a high-tech good. Food production is undertaken by unskilled workers, while the high-tech product is made only by horizontally differentiated skilled workers. Owing to the...

We analyze the relationship between temporal flexibility at work (i.e., the ability to vary or change the time of beginning or ending work) and the motherhood wage gap of working parents, in the US. To that end, we first characterize temporal flexibility at work using the 2017-2018 Leave and Job...

Does mobile broadband subscription rates have a positive effect on closing the earnings gap? Examining United States county level data, higher rates of mobile broadband subscription lead to reductions in the earnings gini coefficient. Specifically, a one standard deviation increase in mobile...

We study the effect of bank merger deregulation on market structure and wages in the banking industry. We show that state deregulation of bank mergers and acquisitions increased the market share of large, multi-state banks and lowered wages for bank workers by up to 8 percentage points, with...

This paper summarizes statistics on the key aspects of the distribution of earnings levels and earnings changes using administrative (social security) data from Italy between 1985 and 2016. During the time covered by our data, earnings inequality and earnings volatility increased, while earnings...