Applicants for any given job are more or less suited to fill it, and the firm will select the best among them. Increasing the wage offer attracts more applicants and makes it possible to raise the hiring standard, thereby improving the productivity of the staff. Wages that optimize on the...

The occupational skill structure depends on the business cycle if employers respond to shortages of applicants during upturns by lowering their hiring standards. Devereux uses this implication to construct empirical tests for the notion of hiring standards adjustment (the so-called Reder...

Using stochastic panel wage frontiers, this paper estimates the relative underpayment of females and males in the reunified Germany. The estimates are initially applied to discrimination analysis. It finds that females have higher underpayment and that the male-female differential increased over...