Why does job displacement, e.g., following import competition, technological change, or economic downturns, result in permanent wage losses? The job displacement literature is silent on whether wage losses after job displacement are driven by lost firm wage premiums or worker productivity...

The US and many European countries are witnessing substantial changes in the wage structure (Autor et al. 2006; Dustmann et al., 2009). Previous research has focused on changing returns to education and experience (Katz and Murphy, 1992), changes in the workforce composition (Lemieux, 2006), or the...

How important is mastering information and communications technology (ICT) in modern labor markets? Previous research offers no guidance in assessing the labor-market returns to ICT skills, primarily because skill data have been unavailable. We draw on unique data that provide internationally...

This paper studies whether the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy offers fundamentally new perspectives for those who, in economic terms, were relatively deprived under the old regime. Previous empirical research on this question has been limited by the availability of...

There is considerable debate on whether the prospects of entering a high-paid job are better for those in low-paid jobs compared to the unemployed. Whilst some scholars argue that there is a scarring effect of unemployment others highlight that low pay might signal a low productivity and...

This paper addresses the importance of compositional changes in the labor force for the development of the wage distribution. Demographic change and higher educational attainment imply a shift toward employees with more experience and/or better education. These groups are characterized by higher...

In this paper I analyze the attractiveness of a rank-order tournament if both market sides, employers and workers, can choose between several payment systems. I consider the self-selection of workers into different payment schemes, their effort provisions and the payment system choices of...

This paper presents a search model with heterogeneous workers, social networks and endogenous search intensity. There are three job search channels available to the unemployed: costly formal applications and two costless informal channels - through family and professional networks. The gain from...

Using administrative data for West Germany, we investigate whether part of the urban wage premium stems from fierce competition in thick labour markets. We first document fewer search frictions in denser labour markets. We further show that controlling for search frictions lowers the wage...

This paper presents a 3x3 general equilibrium model of an OLG-economy with financial intermediaries, technological uncertainty, heterogeneous agents with quasi-homothetic preferences to analyze structural change between the real and the financial sector as well as within the financial sector....