Wage Gaps Large and Small The law of one wage does not strictly hold, nor should it be expected to hold, in contemporary labor markets. The law of one wage, however, provides a surprisingly good first approximation of the structure of U.S. wages. This generalization is drawn from research on a diverse set of topics: the Mincerian wage equation and earnings imputation, union wage differentials, ...

The recent rise in wage inequality is usually attributed to skill-biased technical change (SBTC), associated with new computer technologies. We review the evidence for this hypothesis, focusing on the implications of SBTC for overall wage inequality and for changes in wage differentials between groups. A key problem for the SBTC hypothesis is that wage inequality stabilized in the 1990s despite...

Inter-industry Wage Dispersion in Portugal: high but falling This paper examines the size of inter-industry wage dispersion in Portugal and compares with other countries. We find that the country has a high inter-industry wage inequality compared with the European standard. Nevertheless, the dispersion reduced over the 1980s and the early 1990s along a process of centralisation of the wage sett...

We interpret workers’ confidence in their own skills as their morale, and investigate the implication of worker overconfidence on the firm’s optimal wage-setting policies. In our model, wage contracts both provide incentives and affect worker morale, by revealing private information of the firm about worker skills. We provide conditions for the non-differentiation wage policy to be profit-maxim...

A Menu of Minimum Wage Variables for Evaluating Wages and Employment Effects: Evidence from Brazil The international literature on minimum wage greatly lacks empirical evidence from developing countries. Brazil’s minimum wage policy is a distinctive and central feature of the Brazilian economy. Not only are increases in the minimum wage large and frequent but the minimum wage has also been used...

Abstract—This paper uses a primary data from 670 Chinese manufacturing firms, together with the newly introduced regressionbased inequality decomposition method, to study the effect of openness on wage inequality. We find that openness leads to a positive industry wage premium, but its contribution to firm-level wage inequality is relatively small, only 4.69%. The major contributor to wage ineq...

Abstract Does flexible pay increase the gender wage gap? To answer this question, we analyze wages of public school teachers in Wisconsin, where a 2011 reform allowed districts to set teachers’ more flexibly and engage individual negotiations. Using quasi-exogenous variation timing introduction pay, driven by expiration preexisting collective-bargaining agreements, show that lowered salaries wo...

in iran’s system of tripartite collective bargaining, does the wage-policy maker consistently react optimally to the best move made by the exchange rate-policy maker (nash-rule) or only to the state of economy (non-nash rule)?. this paper not only investigates the nature of the political game (nash rule against non-nash rule) but also estimates some structural parameters by using 2sls method an...

We consider efficiency wage effects in a union-firm bargaining model with private information. We show that an increase in the efficiency wage effects does not necessarily increase the wage level at equilibrium, even when the wage bargaining with private information is close to one with complete information. However, if it is commonly known that the firm is stronger than the union and the deman...

Theories of turnover and wage dynamics have studied the impact of wage levels on turnover, but they have failed explicitly to model the role of wage growth in predicting turnover. This article presents a theory of turnover that explains why within-job wage growth reduces the likelihood of worker-firm separations. The model determines the evolution of value among jobs that differ systematically ...