We study wage effects of two important elements of non-wage labour costs: firing costs and payroll taxes. We exploit a reform that introduced substantial reduction in these two provisions for unemployed workers aged less than 30 and over 45 years who got a permanent job. A matching model with heterogeneous workers predicts positive wage effects of reducing firing costs but ambiguous wage effect...

Publication selection bias represents one of the most serious challenges to the integrity of empirical economics. We develop Heckman regression methods to solve this potentially persistent problem and apply these meta-regression methods to seventy five empirical estimates from the efficiency-wage literature. Although many researchers find mixed or ambiguous support for the efficiency wage hypot...

We consider a frictional labor market in which firms want to insure their senior employees against income fluctuations and, at the same time, want to recruit new employees to fill their vacant positions. Firms can commit to a wage schedule, i.e. a schedule that specifies the wage paid by the firm to its employees as function of their tenure and other observables. However, firms cannot commit to...

In view of rising wage inequality and increasing poverty, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of the introduction of a nationwide legal minimum wage of € 7.5 per hour on the basis of a microsimulation model which accounts for the complex interactions between individual wages, the tax-benefit sys...

This paper investigates the developments in wage inequality in Indonesia from 1994 to 2007. Wage changes are decomposed at the mean as well along the wage distribution. In earlier years, the substantial growth in the earnings of workers was accompanied by moderately declining earnings inequality, a development driven by the effect of coefficients (“prices”). However, in recent years, wage inequ...

The objective of this paper is to provide a comparative assessment of the consequences of worker displacement in France and the United-States. I estimate wage losses of displaced workers in the two countries and examine the relative contribution of two important sources of post-displacement wage adjustments. The first one relates to the loss of seniority-accumulated firmspecific earnings potent...

In a stylized Neo-Keynesian model with Calvo-type price and wage stickiness, this paper evaluates the usefulness of delegating price level and nominal wage targets to a discretionary central bank when the monetary policy objectives are summarized by a utility-based loss function. Despite its ability to engender policy inertia, price level targeting is often dominated by inflation targeting when...

In this study we consider a labor market matching model where firms post wagetenure contracts and workers, both employed and unemployed, search for new job opportunities. Given workers are risk averse, we establish there is a unique equilibrium in the environment considered. Although firms in the market make different offers in equilibrium, all post a wage-tenure contract that implies a worker’...

Wage Inequality in the United Kingdom, 1975-99 This paper uses micro data from the New Earnings Survey to document that cross-sectional wage inequality in the U.K., which rose sharply in the 1980s and continued to rise moderately through the mid-1990s, has remained essentially unchanged in the latter half of the 1990s. As in the U.S., changes in within-group inequality are shown to account for ...

Using a large-scale linked-employer-employee data set from western Germany, this paper presents new evidence on the wage premium of collective bargaining contracts. In contrast to previous studies, we seek to assess the extent to which differences in wages between workers in covered and uncovered firms arise from the non-random selection of workers and firms into collective bargaining coverage....