In this paper, the relationship between labor-market segmentation and the gender wage gap is analyzed with data from the 1998 Swiss Wage Structure Survey. It is shown that in three selected industries (health-care industry, catering industry, banking and insurance industry) the unexplained and potentially discriminatory gender wage differential is substantially larger in the primary than in the...

Wage Dispersion and Wage Dynamics Within and Across Firms This paper examines wage dispersion and wage dynamics in a stock-flow matching economy with on-the-job search. Under stock-flow matching, job seekers immediately become fully informed about the stock of viable vacancies. If only one option is available, monopsony wages result. With more than one firm bidding, Bertrand wages arise. The in...

Facing a stochastic market wage, which is independent of their own hiring policy, employers offer contracts specifying fixed wage, revenue share and employment duration. In ongoing employment relations it depends on the treatment whether fixed wages can be only increased or also decreased. Will the uncertainty of the future market wage and less wage flexibility lead to temporary employment? And...

This paper develops a theoretical search framework to analyse the wage losses experienced by displaced workers. We underline the importance of accounting for two different sources of wage losses whose consequences might differ, namely the loss of rents earned on their predisplacement job and the loss of accumulated firm-specific human capital. We then turn to the measurement and decomposition o...

This paper analyzes the macroeconomic effects of a national union, which coordinates the wage negotiations in different industries, in a small open economy, trading in imperfectly competitive world markets. Industry wage levels are determined as cooperative Nash bargaining solutions on the labor demand curve. If wage contracts affect industry output prices, a national union leads to wage modera...

Evolution of the Industrial Wage Structure in China Since 1980 Industry mean wages in China have exhibited sharply increased dispersion since the early 1990s. The upward trend in differences of average wages among major industry groups parallels increases in wage and income inequality not only between rural and urban sectors but within the urban economy as well. Research on the trend has focuse...

This paper aims at answering the question: How does a typically European bargaining system |with collective bargaining, extension mechanisms and national minimum wage |coexist with low unemployment rate and high wage °exibility? A unique data set on workers, ̄rms and collective bargaining contracts in the Portuguese economy is used to analyze the determinants of both the bargained wage and the ...

Job Search, Human Capital and Wage Inequality The objective of this paper is to construct and quantitatively assess an equilibrium search model with on-the-job search and general human capital accumulation. In the model workers enter the labour market with different abilities and firms differ in their productivities. Wages are dispersed because of search frictions and workers’ productivity diff...

Traditional analysis of gender wage gaps has largely focused on average gaps between men and women, and mean wage decompositions such as the Blinder-Oaxaca (1973) decomposition method. To answer the question of whether there is a " glass ceiling " or a " sticky floor " , i.e. whether wage gaps are higher at the upper or lower ends of the wage distribution, this paper examines the wage gaps acro...

The wage of the 90th (richest) percentile of the wage distribution in Chile increased faster than the median wage and the wage of the 10th percentile between 1975 and 1990. By contrast, from 1990 onwards the wage of the 10th percentile and the median wage grew faster than the 90th percentile. This is one of many findings showing that wage inequality in Chile has been falling, first slowly, then...