In this paper, we study the impact of tax policy on wage negotiations, workers' effort, and employment when effort is only imperfectly observable. We show that the different wage-setting motives – rent sharing and effort incentives – reinforce the effects of partial tax policy measures but not necessarily those of more fundamental tax reforms. We show that a higher degree of tax progression alw...

Using the National Compensation Survey between 2004-2014, we document substantial cyclical heterogeneity among performance pay and fixed wage jobs. We find that employment growth in performance pay (fixed wage) jobs is countercyclical (procyclical), whereas compensation per employee growth is procyclical (countercyclical). Our estimates are identified off the response of similar work levels wit...

In efficient global labour markets for very high wage workers one might expect wage differentials between migrant and domestic workers to reflect differences in labour productivity. However, using panel data on worker-firm matches in a single industry over a seven year period we find a substantial wage penalty for domestic workers which persists within firms and is only partially accounted for ...

This paper demonstrates, contrary to what has been shown recently, that demand pressure, besides cost-pressure, matters both in the labor market and the market for goods in the determination of wage and price inflation. We consider and estimate both wage and price Phillips-curves for the U.S., using OLS and nonparametric estimation techniques. The finding is that on the whole wages are more fle...

The Elasticity of Labor Demand and the Optimal Minimum Wage Contrary to widespread belief, we show that low-pay workers might not generally prefer that the minimum wage rate be increased to a level where the labor demand is unitary elastic. Rather, there exists a critical value of elasticity of labor demand such that increases in the minimum wage rate make low-pay workers better off for higher ...

This paper demonstrates, contrary to what has been shown recently, that demand pressure, besides differentiated cost-pressure, matters both in the labor market and the market for goods in the determination of wage and price inflation. We consider from the theoretical perspective and estimate for the USA, using OLS and more advanced methods, both separately and simultaneously wage and price Phil...

In this paper we estimate the intrahousehold distribution of household’s private expenditures between men and women (the sharing rule) in two types of Spanish households: those in which the woman works and those in which the woman does not work. The results for working women are parallel to those obtained for other countries which indicate a proportionally higher transfer from the woman to the ...

Elvira, Saporta / COLLECTIVE BARGAINING The authors study the effect of unionization on gender wage differentials for production workers in nine U.S. manufacturing industries. They find that the wage gap is significantly smaller in unionized establishments for six of the industries, even after controlling for occupation and establishment gender composition. But this union effect does not hold w...

How do workers make wage comparisons? Both an experimental study and an analysis of 16,000 British employees are reported. Satisfaction and well-being levels are shown to depend on more than simple relative pay. They depend upon the ordinal rank of an individual’s wage within a comparison group. ‘Rank’ itself thus seems to matter to human beings. Moreover, consistent with psychological theory, ...