Regression and neural network models of wage determination are constructed where the explanatory variables include detailed information about skills. People skills, strategic skills, and IT skills all carry strong and significant wage premia; problemsolving skills (surprisingly) and physical skills (less surprisingly) do not. In contrast to the impact of school curriculum on subsequent earnings...

This paper examines the relationship between downward nominal wage rigidity and employment outcomes using a novel linked employer-employee dataset from Germany. The estimates suggest wage rigidity prevents 24.5 percent of counterfactual wage cuts, with a standard deviation of 23.5 percent across establishments. An establishment with the average level of wage rigidity is predicted to have a 0.7 ...

Do Labour Market Institutions Matter? Micro-Level Wage Effects of International Outsourcing in Three European Countries This paper studies the impact of outsourcing on individual wages in three European countries with markedly different labour market institutions: Germany, the UK and Denmark. To do so we use individual level data sets for the three countries and construct comparable measures of...

Paying More to Hire the Best? Foreign Firms, Wages and Worker Mobility In the context of the debate on the labour-market consequences of globalisation, we examine worker mobility in order to identify the wage differences between foreign and domestic firms. Using matched employer-employee panel data for Portugal, we consider virtually all spells of interfirm mobility over a period of ten years. ...

One of the oldest views on wage determination holds that wage differences reflect compensation for hedonic aspects of jobs such as the risk of injuries and occupational diseases. This paper studies the importance of such compensating wage differentials using longitudinal information on workers and firms. This data allows us to disentangle the wage and risk components that are attached to the wo...

In a laboratory experiment we show that minimum wages have significant and lasting effects on subjects' reservation wages. The temporary introduction of a minimum wage leads to a rise in subjects' reservation wages which persists even after the minimum wage has been removed. Firms are therefore forced to pay higher wages after the removal of the minimum wage than before its introduction. As a c...

In this paper, the relationship between labor-market segmentation and the gender wage gap is analyzed with data from the 1998 Swiss Wage Structure Survey. It is shown that in three selected industries (health-care industry, catering industry, banking and insurance industry) the unexplained and potentially discriminatory gender wage differential is substantially larger in the primary than in the...

How Immigrants Fare Across the Earnings Distribution: International Analyses This paper applies the quantile regression methodology to the study of the determinants of the distribution of earnings among the native born and immigrants in the United States and Australia. The analysis for immigrants is performed separately for those from Englishspeaking and non-English speaking origins. Using Cens...