Work of low-skilled migrant workers from developing countries in developed economies is a growing phenomenon and a key political and economic issue. An extensive literature has found (for the most part) that these workers come from the lower part of the skill distribution. This paper revisits...

Labor market theories allowing for search frictions make marked predictions on the effect of the degree of frictions on wages. Often, the effect is predicted to be negative. Despite the popularity of these theories, this has never been tested. We perform tests with matched worker-firm data. The...

In this paper we study the occupational progress and earnings attainment of immigrants in Germany over time and compare them to native Germans. Our analysis is guided by the human capital and segmented labor market theories. To assess the separate effects of occupational segmentation and...

This paper develops a descriptive methodology for the analysis of wage growth of immigrants, based on human capital theory. The sources of the wage growth are: (i) the rise of the return to imported human capital; (ii) the impact of accumulated experience in the host country; and, (iii) the...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the relationship between reservation wages of unemployed workers and macroeconomic factors - including aggregate and local unemployment rates, generosity of the unemployment compensation system and characteristics of the wage structure - as well as...

The increase in wage inequality in Russia during its transition process has far exceeded the increase in wage dispersion observed in other European countries undergoing transition. Russia also has an extremely large incidence of wage arrears. We analyze to what extent wage arrears affect the...

Using Polish Labour Force Survey data, we examine whether competition for labor has induced individual pay to depend on outside options, availability and quality of jobs. Exploiting the lack of inter-regional job and worker flows, we estimate the elasticity of individual pay, amongst a rich set...

In this paper we extend a job search-matching model with firm-specific investments in training developed by Mortensen (2000) to allow for different offer arrival rates in employment and unemployment. The model by Mortensen changes the original wage posting model (Burdett and Mortensen, 1998) in...

Greece’s labour market entered the COVID-19 shock following several years of sustained employment growth and with wages picking up. Unemployment remained high and employment rates were low, especially among women, the young and older workers. The shock led to a sharp fall in labour force...