The purpose of this paper is to sort out firm-related differences from effects that result from different economic structures. A non-parametric decomposition is used to analyse firm level difference between the wage spread in the two major regions of unified Germany. If firm-specific effects...

East German wages have been below the West German wage level since unification. Moreover, the East-West wage gap implied by the contractual wages specified in collective wage agreements is drifting ever further apart from the wage gap in terms of effective wages. This paper looks at the role of...

Using individual level data from Turkstat Household Labor Force Survey for 2005-2009 period, we analyze whether there is a wage gap between formal and informal workers with comparable observable characteristics, where the formality of employment is defined with respect to individuals registry...

Using individual level data from Turkstat Household Labor Force Survey for 2005-2009 period and a variety of parametric and semi-parametric techniques, we test two hypothesis regarding formal and informal labor markets: whether there is a wage gap between formal and informal workers and whether...

Economic conditions such as convexity, homogeneity, homotheticity, and monotonicity are all important assumptions or consequences of assumptions of economic functionals to be estimated. Recent research has seen a renewed interest in imposing constraints in nonparametric regression. We survey the...

This paper defines informal sector employment and decomposes the difference in earnings distributions between formal and informal sector employees in Tajikistan for 2007. Using the quantile regression decomposition technique proposed by Machado and Mata (2005), we find a significant informal...

Using administrative, individual-level, longitudinal data from the state of Georgia, this paper finds that a documented worker employed by a firm that hires undocumented workers can expect to earn 0.15 percent less than if employed by a firm that does not hire undocumented workers. However, in...

This paper examines the impact of the legal status of overseas migrants on their wages upon return to the home country. Using unique data from Egypt, which allows us to distinguish between return migrants according to their type of international migration, documented versus undocumented, we...

How will the emergence of ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) affect the skill premium? To address this question, we propose a nested constant elasticity of substitution production function that distinguishes among three types of capital: traditional physical capital...

Wages have been spreading out across workers over time - or in other words, the 90th/50th wage ratio has risen over time. A key question is, has the productivity distribution also spread out across worker skill levels over time? Using our calculations of productivity by skill level for the U.S.,...