This paper uses micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel to document that the wage structure in West Germany was remarkably stable during 1984-97, with little variation over time in wage or earnings inequality between and within different skill groups. Empirical evidence suggests that...

How many people are employed by the government? How many are employed by the central government compared with the state and local authorities? How many are employed in public enterprise? How much are they all paid? How much are they paid relative to each other, or relative to the private sector?...

This paper assesses whether the scaling up of aid and the resulting increase in government spending that is needed to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) would be hampered by wage bill ceilings that are often part of government programs supported by the IMF''s Poverty Reduction and...

This paper argues that sex discrimination is an inefficient practice. We model sex discrimination as the complete exclusion of females from the labor market or as the exclusion of females from managerial positions. The former implies a reduction in GDP per capita; the latter distorts the...

Australia''s remarkable economic performance during the 1990s has not resulted in a significant convergence of real per capita income, output, and employment levels across the country''s states and territories. This paper explores the role of certain economic rigidities that may have contributed...

Government wage, benefit, and employment decisions are not taken on a profit-maximizing basis and have a substantial impact on aggregate labor market performance and unemployment. In a two-sector labor market model with free mobility of labor, an increase in government wages or benefits reduces...

Search models with posting and match-specific heterogeneity generate wage dispersion. Given K values for the match-specific variable, it is known that there are K reservation wages that could be posted, but generically never more than two actually are posted in equilibrium. What is unknown is...

Over the past decade, productivity-adjusted wages have grown at a slower pace in Japan than in other rich countries. This paper suggests that Japan''s dualities between regular and ""nonregular"" labor market contracts and the relatively inefficient services sector have exacerbated the negative...