The process leading to the setting of the minimum wage so far has been fairly overlooked by economists. This paper suggests that this is a serious limitation as the setting regime contributes to explain cross-country variation in the fine-tuning of the minimum wage, hence in the way in which the...

While much of the literature that investigates the part-time (PT) / full-time (FT) hourly wage differential and its causes focuses on average effects, very few studies analyze the heterogeneous effects of PT work across different subgroups, despite the policy relevance of understanding channels...

After a decade in which wages and employment fell precipitously in low-skill occupations and expanded in high-skill occupations, the shape of U.S. earnings and job growth sharply polarized in the 1990s. Employment shares and relative earnings rose in both low and high-skill jobs, leading to a...

Economic regions, such as urban agglomerations, face external demand and price shocks that produce income risk. Workers in large and diversified agglomerations may benefit from reduced wage volatility, while firms may outsource the production of intermediate goods and realize benefits from...

This paper examines the size of inter-industry wage dispersion in Portugal and compares with other countries. We find that the country has a high inter-industry wage inequality compared with the European standard. Nevertheless, the dispersion reduced over the 1980s and the early 1990s along a...

This paper presents an application of the Generalised Error Correction Model (GECM) for heterogeneous factor demands based on the quadratic cost function. Using data for 26 West German manufacturing industries over the period 1976-1995, it turns out that less general specifications such as the...

Using information on family background, we estimate returns to education, allowing for the heterogeneity of returns. In order to control for the unobserved heterogeneity shared by family members, we construct a siblings sample and employ family fixed-effects and family correlated random-effects...

This paper addresses the large degree of frictional wage dispersion in US data. The standard job matching model without on-the-job search cannot replicate this pattern. With on-the-job search, however, unemployed job searchers are more will- ing to accept low wage offers since they can continue...

Focusing on the compression of wage cuts, many empirical studies find a high degree of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR). However, the resulting macroeconomic effects seem to be surprisingly weak. This contradiction can be explained within an intertemporal framework in which DNWR not only...

In this article, I analyze the changes in wage inequality in the eastern region, western region and reunified Germany a decade after reunification. For that purpose, I use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for the period 1999 - 2006, and implement the decomposition methodologies of...