Real wage growth in the UK labour market, since around 2003, has slowed down and stagnated. In this paper, we document the nature of real wage changes across the wage distribution over the last three decades, showing that the recent period of stagnant real wage growth represents a distinct break of trend that pre-dates the onset of recession. We explore whether unemployment has become a stronge...

Social Comparisons of Wage Increases and Job Satisfaction* We combine status quo and social comparison considerations and investigate whether relative wage increases in the sense of differences between individual wage increases and wage increases of comparable employees are related to managers’ job satisfaction. Using a panel data set of managers in the German chemical industry, we indeed find ...

Unions, Wage Gaps, and Wage Dispersion: New Evidence from the Americas Using a common methodology, the effects of unions on wage levels and wage dispersion are estimated for two neighboring countries, Bolivia and Chile, and for the U.S. The analysis shows that unions have broadly similar effects on the wage distribution within these three economies. The findings suggest that the political econo...

Job and Wage Mobility in a Search Model with Non-Compliance (Exemptions) with the Minimum Wage How well does a simple search on-the-job model fit the eighteen years of job and wage mobility of high school graduates? To answer this question we are confronted from the data with a prevalent non-compliance and exemptions from the minimum wage. We incorporate this observation in a job search model w...

This study analyzes real wage cyclicality for male full-time workers within employer-employee matches in Germany over the period 1984–2004. Five different wage measures are compared: the standard hourly wage rate; hourly wage earnings including overtime and bonus pay; the effective wage, which takes into account unpaid overtime; and monthly earnings, with and without additional pay. None of the...