Sustained growth in earnings and wage inequality over the past few decades (most notably in the U.S. but also in many other developed countries) has generated widespread interest in both its causes and consequences, spurring large bodies of research in labor economics, macroeconomics, and growth economics.1 Perhaps, the greatest efforts have been devoted to understanding the role of skills, obs...

We analyze the changes in earnings of paid workers (wage earners) in rural India from 2004/05 to 2011/12. Real earnings increased at all percentiles, and the percentage increase was larger at the lower end. Consequently, earnings inequality declined. Recentered influence function decompositions show that throughout the earnings distribution, except at the very top, both changes in “worker chara...

The earnings replacement rates of retired couples, which take into account the earnings and benefits of wives, are important for assessing the adequacy of social security benefits. Using data from the Social Security Administration’s longitudinal Retirement History Study, this article presents the first view of replacement rates for couples. The findings show that, though about half the wives c...

Temporary workers make up a sizeable part of the labor force in many countries, including Korea. This paper uses an extension of a standard efficiency wage model to explain the wage gap between temporary and permanent workers. Temporary workers have a chance to become permanent; this possibility – combined with the existence of an employment rent for permanent workers – gives short-term workers...

Abstract We use inventory write‐downs to differentiate opportunistic and non‐opportunistic overproduction measures. posit that is positively associated with future because generally leads excess inventory, while (to inflate earnings) negatively decrease earnings. find change‐based proxies (deviations from past behaviour) are the likelihood of write‐downs, whereas residual‐based industry norms) ...

The computation of implied cost of capital (ICC) is constrained by the fact that around half of all firms do not have analysts’ earnings forecasts. Hou, van Dijk and Zhang (2012, HVZ) present a cross-sectional model to generate forecasts and compute ICC from these forecasts. However, the forecasts from the HVZ model perform worse than those from a naïve random walk model and show anomalous corr...

Using a data set of Taiwanese female graduates in 2006, this study finds that height and earnings are positively correlated for full-time workers. However, it is not because tall individuals went to better colleges or received better grades (cognitive ability), not because they are gifted with superior physical strength or because they have participated in more extracurricular activities (non-c...

Argentina experienced an important increase in wage dispersion in the last 20 years. This increase occurred not only across different education groups, but also within these groups. In spite of exceptional economic growth rates, after the 2001/2002 macroeconomic crisis, residual inequality remained high. This paper applies a search model with exogenous human capital accumulation to Argentinean ...

This paper posits a notion of the value of an individual’s human capital and the associated return on human capital. These concepts are examined using U.S. data on male earnings and financial asset returns. We decompose the value of human capital into a bond, a stock and a residual value component. We find that (1) the bond component of human capital is larger than the stock component at all ag...