Austria is among the very few countries in the European Union which have managed to maintain comparatively low unemployment rates and high employment rates. In international comparison Austrian unemployment is very stable over the business cycle. This is mainly due to the high sensitivity of the...

Wir untersuchen den Beitrag von betriebsspezifischen Lohnaufschlägen, die in jüngerer Zeit zur Erhöhung der Lohnungleichheit in Westdeutschland beigetragen haben. Es werden Modelle mit additiv fixen Effekten für Arbeitnehmer und Betriebe für vier verschiedene Zeitintervalle über den...

This paper examines the consequences of creating a fully competitive market in a sector previously dominated by a cost-minimizing public firm. Workers in the economy are heterogeneous in their intrinsic motivation to work in the sector. In line with empirical findings, our model implies that...

Civil servants have a reputation for being lazy. However, people's personal experiences with civil servants frequently run counter to this stereotype. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive...

This paper explores the meaning and implications of the desire by workers for impact. We find that this impact motive can make a firm in a competitive labor market face an upward-sloping supply curve of labor, lead workers with the same characteristics but at different firms to earn different...

Many street-level bureaucrats (such as caseworkers) have the dual task of helping some clients, while sanctioning others. We develop a model of such a street-level bureaucracy and study the implications of its personnel policy on the self-selection and allocation decisions of agents who differ...

At first blush, most advances in labour demand were achieved by the late 1980s. Since then progress might appear to have stalled. We argue to the contrary that significant progress has been made in understanding labour market frictions and imperfections, and in modelling search behaviour and...

We use the Mexican labor market structure to price the set of fringe benefits that household heads receive when formally employed. We exploit longitudinal, nationally-representative information on household heads who are formal, informal, or switch status at least once in our data. Using monthly...

This paper investigates the wage-setting behaviour of Irish firms. We place particular emphasis on the use of flexible pay components and examine how these allow firms to deal with shocks requiring a reduction in costs without having to cut base wages. The results presented in this paper are...

Parametric regression models are often not flexible enough to capture the true relationships as they tend to rely on arbitrary identification assumptions. Using the UK Labor Force Survey, the authors estimate the causal effect of national minimum wage (NMW) increases on the probability of job...