This paper revisits labor market effects of the minimum wage by taking advantage of a unique institutional setting and rich data from Russia covering 89 regions over 10 years, from 2001 to 2010. Our empirical analysis draws on the methodology introduced by Neumark and Wascher, in which labor market outcomes at the regional level are related to the relative minimum wage (captured by the Kaitz in...

An input-output model is used to analyze price pass-through effects of a minimum wage increase on prices of the food and kindred products and food-service industries. These sectors employ a disproportionate share of minimum wage workers, but results suggest a $0.50 increase in the present minimum wage would increase food prices less than 1 percent for most of the 12 food and kindred products pr...

We use a linked employer-employee data set from Germany to estimate the wage effect of foreignaffiliates in (the former) East and West Germany. In addition, the wage effects of the large number of West German affiliates which are located in East Germany are also considered. The implemented techniques allow us to control both for workerand plant-level unobserved components of earnings. We find l...

Glass Ceilings or Glass Doors? Wage Disparity Within and Between Firms We investigate whether immigrant and minority workers’ poor access to high-wage jobs – that is, glass ceilings – is attributable to poor access to jobs in high-wage firms, a phenomenon we call glass doors. Our analysis uses linked employer-employee data to measure meanand quantile-wage differentials of immigrants and ethnic ...

Wage Differentials in the 1990s in Israel: Endowments, Discrimination, and Selectivity The purpose of this paper is to investigate wage structures of professional workers in the Israeli labor market, using data from the most recent 1995 Census and correcting for selectivity at the stage of entrance into the occupation. The sample of professionals is decomposed into several subsamples: men and w...

This paper develops an equilibrium job search model in which the employed worker privately accumulates human capital and continually searches for a better paying job. The firm cannot observe the level of human capital of the worker nor the job search outcome. In order to induce truthful revelation on the level of human capital, the firm offers a menu of contracts with different lifetime values ...

The consensus in the literature investigating the causes of increased wage inequality in developed nations since 1980 is that skill-biased technical change is responsible for the widening of the wage distribution. A shortcoming in this literature is that technical change is commonly determined residually; that is, those changes in relative wages unexplained by other factors are attributed to ch...

a r t i c l e i n f o JEL classification: F16 F43 J24 J31 O31 O33 Keywords: North–South trade Technological knowledge Human capital Wage inequality This paper develops an endogenous growth model with technological knowledge directed towards high-versus low-skilled labour, augmented with North–South international trade of intermediate goods and with human-capital accumulation, to analyse how tra...

Holdup in Oligopsonistic Labour Markets: A New Role for the Minimum Wage We consider a labour market model of oligopsonistic wage competition and show that there is a holdup problem although workers do not have any bargaining power. When a firm invests more, it pays a higher wage in order to attract workers from competitors. Because workers participate in the returns on investment while only fi...

The Effects of Unions on Wage Inequality: The Italian Case in the 1990s In this paper we analyse the contribution of union activity to reducing earnings inequality. Given the specific nature of the system of industrial relations, Italian unions may contribute to inequality reduction through either national bargaining (i.e. reducing between-sector differentials) and/or local bargaining (i.e. red...