In this paper we show that rent sharing plays a role in accounting for the glass ceiling effect. We make use of a unique employer-employee panel database for Italy from 1996 to 2003, which allows controlling for observed individual and firm heterogeneity and for collective bargaining. Moreover,...

We study union wage effects when membership is non-coercive and employers reserve the right of union recognition. Using the BHPS during 1995-2009 we find evidence of membership differentials for the lower male and middle female observed skill groups. The coverage differential at the bottom of...

Germany's occupational and sectoral change towards a knowledge-based economy calls for high returns on education. Nevertheless, female graduates are paid much less than their male counterparts. We find an overall unadjusted gender pay gap among German graduates of 27 %. This corresponds to an...

Investing in human capital increases lifetime income, but these investments may involve substantial risk. In this paper we use a Finnish panel spanning 22 years to predict the mean, the variance and the skew of the present value of lifetime income, and to calculate certainty equivalent lifetime...

This paper provides the first empirical evidence for Mexico about relative wage dif ferences between college-educated and high-school-educated workers across five-year age groups. Rotating panel surveys are used to implement an imperfect substitution model for similar male workers between dif...

Child birth leads to a break in a woman's employment history and is considered one reason for the relatively poor labor market outcomes observed for women compared to men. However, the time spent at home after child birth varies significantly across mothers and is likely driven by observed and,...

Macroeconomic imbalances in the EMU are at the heart of the current crisis. A widely popular explanation for the high current account deficits in the Southern European countries is that they lack a large, competitive and export-oriented industrial sector. The paper tests the hypothesis that...

We propose an original model of human capital investments after leaving school in which individuals di¤er in their initial human capital obtained at school, their rate of return, their costs of human capital investments and their terminal values of human capital at a fixed date in the future....

How do firm-level collective agreements affect firm performance in a multi-level bargaining system? Using detailed Belgian linked employer-employee panel data, our findings show that firm agreements increase both wage costs and productivity (with respect to sector-level agreements). Relying on a...

Human capital investments increase lifetime income, but may involve substantial risk. In this paper we use a Finnish panel spanning 22years to nonparametrically predict the mean, the variance and the skew of the present value of lifetime income, and to calculate certainty equivalent lifetime...