This paper is based on individual-level wage data made available by the Swedish Employers’ Federation (SAF). We are grateful to Ari Hietasalo and Åke Kempe SAF for their extensive and exceptionally expert cooperation in preparing these data for analysis. We thank John Ekberg and Jeremy Fox for excellent research assistance. This research was supported by the Swedish Council for Research in the ...

This paper examines how the removal of national pay scales, a common feature public sector labor markets, affects productivity. We exploit reform that compelled all schools in England to replace scales with school-designed performance related schemes. Using teacher-level data, we find response reform, markets better outside options for teachers have relatively higher teacher progression, spendi...

Urban labor markets are characterized by the spatial proximity of households and businesses, which offers firms and workers advantages that lead to more efficient markets, enhanced productivity, and greater economic success. Nevertheless, the nation's city, while generating a large proportion of the nation's wealth, houses much of the nation's economic disadvantaged workers. This paper describe...

Promotion of low-skilled off-farm rural labor market participation can be an important strategy to improve livelihoods and food security of the poor in developing countries. This paper investigates rural farm households' participation in low-skilled off-farm labor markets with disaggregate data from a survey of 400 households in Tigray, the northern highlands of Ethiopia. Adopting Heckman's two...

In the U.S. South, a free labor market rapidly—although, in some cases, only nominally— replaced the plantation system of slave labor in the years following the American Civil War. Drawing on data comprising 75,099 transactions in the antebellum period, as well as 1,378 labor contracts in the postbellum era, I examine how the valuation of black labor was transformed between the 1830s and the ye...

The study of labor flows across labor markets is a central ingredient in any discussion of labor market equilibrium. These labor flows help markets reach a more efficient allocation of resources. This paper surveys the economic analysis of immigration. It investigates the determinants of the immigration decision by workers in source countries and the impact of that decision on the host country'...

Untangling Trade and Technology: Evidence from Local Labor Markets We juxtapose the effects of trade and technology on employment in U.S. local labor markets between 1990 and 2007. Labor markets whose initial industry composition exposes them to rising Chinese import competition experience significant falls in employment, particularly in manufacturing and among non-college workers. Labor market...

I use linked employer-employee data from the German Federal Statistical Office to estimate within-firm wage differentials between temporary workers with fixed-term contracts and workers with permanent contracts in the context of dual internal labor markets. Wage-tenure profiles of permanent workers are estimated separately for each firm to obtain a proxy for the prevalence of internal labor mar...