Does increasing incomes improve health? In 1999, the UK government implemented minimum wage legislation, increasing hourly wages to at least £3.60. This policy experiment created intervention and control groups that can be used to assess the effects of increasing wages on health. Longitudinal data were taken from the British Household Panel Survey. We compared the health effects of higher wages...

We study a labour market equilibrium model in which firms sign optimal long-term contracts with workers. Firms that are financially constrained offer an increasing wage profile: they pay lower wages today in exchange for higher future wages once they become unconstrained. Because constrained firms grow faster, the model predicts a positive correlation between the growth of wages and the growth ...

This study uses a three-person gift-exchange game experiment to examine the impact of pay comparisons on effort behavior. We compare effort choices made in a treatment where coworkers’ wages are secret with effort choices made in two ‘public wages’ treatments. The two ‘public wages’ treatments differ in whether co-workers’ wages are chosen by an employer, or are fixed exogenously by the experim...

Immigration to the UK, particularly among more educated workers, has risen appreciably over the past 30 years and as such has raised labor supply. However studies of the impact of immigration have failed to find any significant effect on the wages of native-born workers in the UK. This is potentially puzzling since there is evidence that changes in the supply of educated natives have had signif...

Employment at a multinational enterprise (MNE) responds to wages at the extensive margin, when an MNE expands abroad, and at the intensive margin, when an MNE operates existing affiliates. We present an MNE model and conditions for parametric and nonparametric identification. Prior studies rarely found wages to affect MNE employment. We detect salient adjustments at both margins for German manu...

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...

Given the longstanding shortage of nurses in many jurisdictions, why could not nursing wages be raised to attract more people into the profession? We tell a story in which the status of nursing as a 'vocation' implies that increasing wages reduces the average quality of applicants attracted. The underlying mechanism accords with the notion that increasing wages might attract the 'wrong sort' of...

Using data from the New Immigrant Survey 2003, this article shows that skin color and height affect wages among new lawful immigrants to the United States, controlling for education, English language proficiency, occupation in source country, family background, ethnicity, race, and country of birth. Immigrants with the lightest skin color earn on average 17% more than comparable immigrants with...

When individuals with the same preferences but different gross wages and non-labor incomes allocate time to leisure and labor and contribute to a pure public good, the order of contributors' utilities is a perfect inversion of the order of their gross wages. The same applies to contributors' net and gross wages when contributions are financed by income from labor. There are consequences regardi...

Previous research reported that married men, ceteris paribus, earn more than unmarried men. A variety of explanations have been suggested for this association One class of explanation argues that wives, for various reasons, increase their husbands’ wages. Another class of explanation maintains that the causality is reversed, that is, high wage men are more likely to get married than low income ...