This paper studies the effect of economic integration of two regions on the mobility of skilled and unskilled workers across regions and on the resulting location of industrial activity. In particular, it studies what happens when wages in both regions are set by the unions of the ‘West’ –...

In October 2006, the Economic Policy Institute released a “Raise the Minimum Wage†statement signed by more than 650 individuals. Using an open-ended, non-anonymous questionnaire, we asked the signatories to explain their thinking on the issue. The questionnaire asked about the...

Decomposing wages into worker and firm wage components, we find that firm-fixed components (firm rents) are sizeable parts of workers' wages. If workers can only imperfectly observe the extent of firm rents in their wages, they might be mislead about the overall wage distribution. Such...

This paper examines the associations between obesity, employment status and wages for several European countries. Our results provide weak evidence that obese workers are more likely to be unemployed or tend to be more segregated in self-employment jobs than their non-obese counterparts. We also...

This paper identifies three possible outcomes of higher relative firm bargaining power in a unionized firm facing an upward sloping labor supply curve. The conventional regime with reduced wage and higher employment corresponds to firm bargaining power below a certain critical value. A supply...

This paper presents a simple model that examines the impact of offshoring and immigration on wages and tests these predictions using U.S. state-industry-year panel data. According to the model, the productivity effect causes offshoring to have a more positive impact on low-skilled wages than...

Entre 1984 y 2000 se registraron variaciones importantes en la relación entre salarios de los trabajadores de mayor y menor nivel educativo. Entre 1992 y 1998 se presentó un incremento de esta relación que muy probablemente contribuyó a explicar la reversión de la tendencia previa a la...

Civil servants have a reputation for being lazy. However, people's personal experiences with civil servants frequently run counter to this stereotype. We develop a model of an economy in which workers differ in laziness and in public service motivation, and characterise optimal incentive...

Gender differences in preferences regarding social relationships and competitive environments are well documented in psychology and economics. Research also shows that social relationships and competition among co-workers are affected by the incentive schemes workers are exposed to. We combine...

This paper examines the consequences of creating a fully competitive market in a sector previously dominated by a cost-minimizing public firm. Workers in the economy are heterogeneous in their intrinsic motivation to work in the sector. In line with empirical findings, our model implies that...