Piece rate and performance based wage systems are common in the construction industry. Construction workers are known to have an increased risk of pain and musculoskeletal disorders (MSD). In this cross-sectional questionnaire study, we examined the association between wage system and (1) physical exertion, (2) time pressure, (3) pain, and (4) fatigue. The participants comprised 456 male Danish...

A Contribution to the Empirics of Reservation Wages This paper provides evidence on the behavior of reservation wages over the spell of unemployment using high‐frequency longitudinal data. Using data from our survey of unemployed workers in New Jersey, where workers were interviewed each week for up to 24 weeks, we find that self‐reported reservation wages decline at a modest rate over the spel...

Many studies document significantly positive associations between schooling attainment and wages in developing countries. But when individuals enter occupations subsequent to completing their schooling, they not only face an expected work-life path of wages, but a number of other occupational characteristics, including wage risks and disability risks, for which there may be compensating wage di...

This paper presents an integrated approach to wage and employment determination combining microeconomic evidence with macroeconomic theory. More specifically, we first develop an efficiency wage model with labor turnover and show that the worker’s decision problem gives rise to a quit-rate function. We then use microeconomic data to estimate this quit-rate function and to test the specification...

Using Current Population Survey data, we find that the gap between the wages of black and white males declined during the 1990s at a rate of about .60 percentage point per year. Wage convergence was most rapid among workers with less than 10 years of potential experience, with declines in the gap averaging 1.40 percentage points per year. Using standard decomposition methods, we find that great...

This paper examines the relationship between inflation and wage indexation in the postwar U.S. using data on the prevalence of cost-of-living adjustments in major collective bargaining agreements. I find that increases in inflation precede increases in wage indexation but reductions in inflation do not precede reductions in wage indexation. There is virtually no evidence that wage indexation af...

Blanchflower and Oswald (1994) have argued that, in regional data, the level of unemployment is related to the fevel of wages. This result is at variance with an application of the original Phillips curve to regional data, which would predict that the change in wages ought to be related to the unemployment rate. On the other hand, there is considerable empirical support for the expectations-aug...

This paper focuses on the differences in earnings and labor force status of low-skilled prime age men in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States at the end of the 20th century, and their relation to the differences in wage dispersion. In the UK and the US, where the bottom of the wage distribution is more dispersed, the inactivity rate (sometimes called the not-in-labor force rate) am...

this study examins effects of trade liberalization on the wage inequality across industries and between genders within these industries by utilizing the data of micro-level households’ income and expenditures surveys and trade statistics over 2001-2011. the analysis is carried based on the heckscher–ohlin’s theory in international trade and baker’s taste discrimination theory at firms. we use q...

This paper discusses one important component of the analysis of the decline of the profit rate in the recent decades in Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence. Our single focus in this paper is Brenner’s implicit theory of distribution. It must be emphasized from the outset that the present discussion does not question the central role given by Brenner to the profit rate in his investi...