Remittances and Inequality: A Dynamic Migration Model We develop a model of the interdependencies between migration, remittances and inequality, and investigate how migration and subsequent remittances affect inter-household inequality in the origin communities. An important feature of our model is that we take into account the impact of migration on the local (rural) labor market. Migration is...

Employment Effects of Payroll Taxes An Empirical Test for Germany* This study tests to what degree the incidence of payroll taxes in Germany is on employment and whether in consequence payroll taxes, in particular social insurance contributions, are the culprit behind the growing unemployment problem. Using industry level data for 18 years (1977-1994) we estimate a system of five interdependent...

Job Matching, Social Network and Word-of-Mouth Communication Workers are embedded within a network of social relationships and can communicate through word-of-mouth. They can find a job either directly or through personal contacts. From this micro scenario, we derive an aggregate matching function that has the standard properties but fails to be homogeneous of degree one because of coordination...

Bargained Wages, Wage Drift and the Design of the Wage Setting System This paper aims at answering the question: How does a typically 'European' bargaining system with collective bargaining, extension mechanisms and national minimum wage coexist with low unemployment rate and high wage flexibility? A unique data set on workers, firms and collective bargaining contracts in the Portuguese economy...

Changes in the Structure of Earnings During the Polish Transition We document changes in the structure of earnings during the economic transition in Poland. We find that inequality in labor earnings increased substantially from 1988 to 1996. A common view is that the reallocation of workers from a public sector with a compressed wage distribution, to a private sector with much higher wage inequ...

Unions and the Labor Market for Managers We examine the relationship between the employment and compensation of managers and CEOs and the presence of a unionized workforce. We develop a simple efficiency wage model, with a tradeoff between higher wages for workers and more monitoring, which requires more managers. The model also assumes rent sharing between workers, managers and the owners of t...

Caste, Ethnicity and Poverty in Rural India This paper analyzes the determinants of rural poverty in India, contrasting the situation of the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Schedule Tribe (ST) households with the non-scheduled population. The incidence of poverty among SC and ST households is significantly higher than non-scheduled households. Using a probit decomposition analysis, we decompose the di...

Persistence and the German Unemployment Problem: Empirical Evidence on German Labor Market Flows Using a retrospective monthly calendarium of individuals’ major economic activities, this paper characterizes the monthly employment and unemployment rates and the monthly transition intensities between the states of employment, unemployment, and out-of-thelabor-force for the German labor market bet...

Is Job Stability Declining in Germany? Evidence from Count Data Models The macro evidence of increased adjustment pressure since the early seventies suggests that job mobility should have increased. Hence, retrospective and spell data from the German Socio-Economic Panel are combined in order to test the hypothesis that job stability for German workers declined between 1974 and 1994. Using coun...