We show that if agents are risk neutral, prizes outperform wages if and only if there is su¢ cient pride and envy relative to the noisiness of performance. If agents are risk averse, prizes are a necessary supplement to wages (as bonuses). Keywords: Envy, Pride, Wages, Prizes, Bonus JEL Classi…cation: C72, D01, D23, L14.

Following an agreement between the trade unions and the employer organizations in 1993, Finnish employers could temporarily pay less than the existing minimum wage for young workers. We examine the effects of these minimum wage exceptions by comparing the changes in wages and employment of the groups whose minimum wages were reduced with simultaneous changes among slightly older workers for who...

From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent for women. During this period, inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent. We report a decomposition, relating rising inequality to the union wage distribution’s shrinking weight. We argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity, reducin...

Despite the growing importance of privatization in economic reform programs, little is known about its empirical effects on wages. Using individual-level data from Mexico, I estimate the effects of privatization on industry wages in four cases: the commercial airlines, Teléfonos de México, Siderúrgica Mexicana, and the commercial banks. I find that: (1) privatization is associated with statisti...

The increase in production and productivity are influencing agricultural wages. But the results of empirical studies have shown a positive relationship between real wages and productivity. It is also observed that the real wages seem to have declined or remained stagnant in spite of increasing agricultural production. However, a close relationship may be found between wages and productivity. Th...

the real business cycle theory was applied to investigate the hypothesis of cyclical agreeable treatment of real wages, for men and women work force, in the iranian agricultural sector for the period of 1971-2006. on the basis of this theory, the impacts of supply side shocks (productivity and oil income shocks), are anticipated on the fluctuations of the real wages. the dominant effect of supp...