The evolution of the skill premium (i.e., the wage di erential between skilled and unskilled workers) has interest from at least two perspectives: it is a rough measure of inequality among workers of di erent quali cations and provides information on the characteristics of the development...

A common phenomenon about transition economies is that the return to schooling improves as economic reform progresses. Existing research suggests that Vietnam is not an exception to the pattern. However, the rate of return in period from 1992 to 1998 is still relatively low, below 5 percent,...

The evidence of gender pay gap is present in the Colombian labor market, as in many other countries. This gap is not homogeneous in the territory, which provides the rationale for a detailed analysis of what is happening in each of the regions of the country. The results show differentials of...

We analyze empirically the impact of urban agglomeration on Italian wages. Using micro-data from the Bank of Italy's Survey of Household Income and Wealth for the years 1995, 1998, 2000 and 2002 on more than 22,000 employees distributed in 242 randomly drawn local labor markets (30 percent of...

This paper exploits the long history of the minimum wage in a relatively stable developing economy like Colombia in order to see whether it may alleviate the living conditions of low income families and reduce income inequality. The paper does not only explore how the minimum wage may serve...

This paper analyses the influence of norms of fairness on wage formation. Fairness is defined by `real-wage' and `relative-wage' norms that relate wage offers to workers' own current wage and to the wages of other groups of workers, and, to avoid shirking, firms pay fair wages. The wage norms...

Several studies have identified the impact of trade liberalization in developing countries on the return to education within a Mincerian framework through a difference-in-difference estimator or with industry-level measures of trade openness. These studies have typically estimated the return to...

Firms hiring fresh graduates face uncertainty on the future productivity of workers. Theory suggests that starting wages reflect this, with lower pay for greater uncertainty. We use the dispersion of exam grades within a field of education as an indicator of the unobserved heterogeneity that...

Inspired by a recent observation about an online retail company, this paper explains why a firm may find it optimal to offer an exit bonus to recent hires so as to induce self-selection. We study a double adverse selection problem, in which the principal can neither observe agents’ commitment...

In the last decade we have seen extensive international research on the extent to which wages of individuals respond to changing local labour market conditions. For many countries and periods, an inverse relationship between wages and unemployment rates has been found. Following Blanchflower and...