The paper investigates the role of social norms as a determinant of individual attitudes by analyzing risk proclivity reported by immigrants and natives in a unique representative German survey. We employ factor analysis to construct measures of immigrants’ ethnic persistence and assimilation....

This paper provides both a theoretical and an empirical investigation into the impact of job skill types on the black/white pay differentials. The theoretical analysis derives that the more intensively "soft"/"hard" skills are used in an occupation, the greater/smaller the black/white pay...

We document changes in the structure of earnings during the economic transition in Poland. We find that inequality in labor earnings increased substantially from 1988 to 1996. A common view is that the reallocation of workers from a public sector with a compressed wage distribution, to a private...

This paper studies labour market policy in a society where differently gifted individuals can invest in training to further increase their labour market productivity. Furthermore, the seeks both efficiency and equity. Frictions in the matching process create unemployment and differently skilled...

This paper contains a review of empirical work related to wage rigidity, where researchers have collected their own data. The work includes field studies, economic experiments, and psychological surveys. Economists have done the field studies and experiments, and management scientists and...

This paper investigates the effects of legal minimum wages on wages, employment, hours worked and monthly earnings among workers covered by minimum wage legislation as well as those for whom it does not apply (the uncovered sector) in Costa Rica. This country’s large uncovered sector and...

Does the educational track (technical or professional, as opposed to general) provide individuals with networks that are useful in the labor market? And how do these networks help? In this paper, we consider the effect of the educational track on the means by which individuals find employment,...

This paper investigates the impact of wage dispersion on firm productivity in different working environments. More precisely, it examines the interaction with: i) the skills of the workforce, using a more appropriate indicator than the standard distinction between white- and blue collar workers,...

This paper explores the question: is working as a child harmful to an individual in terms of adult outcomes in earnings? Though an extremely important question, little is known about the effect of child labor on adult outcomes. Estimations of an instrumental variables earnings model on data from...

Taking advantage of a complex minimum wage structure in Honduras, this paper examines how changes in minimum wages over the 1990-2004 period affect unemployment as well as the employment and average wages of workers in different sectors of the economy: medium and large-scale firms v. small firms...