Performance pay is of growing importance to the wage structure as it applies to a rising share of employees. At the same time wage dispersion is growing continuously. This leads to the question of how the growing use of performance pay schemes is related to the increase in wage inequality? German SOEP data for the years 1984 to 2009 confirm the large increase in the application of performance p...

Much research (surveyed in Katz and Autor, 1999) documents a substantial widening of the U.S. wage structure since the late 1970s, driven by increases in educational wage differentials and residual wage inequality. The growth in wage inequality was most rapid during the 1980s, and involved a spreading out of the entire wage distribution. Rapid secular growth in the demand for skills, partly fro...

We analyze wage growth and changes in wage inequality in eleven European countries between 1994 and 2001. The data base used throughout is the User Data Base (UDB) of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP). The decomposition analysis is carried out independently for both genders. Following Juhn, Murphy and Pierce (1991 and 1993) we split the current wage into components to isolate the fo...

From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent among women. Inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent in this period. We report a decomposition, relating rising inequality to the shrinking weight of the union wage distribution. We also argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity r...

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...

There has been a remarkable increase in wage inequality in the US, UK and many other countries over the past three decades. A significant part of this appears to be within observable groups (such as age-gender-skill cells). A generally untested implication of many theories rationalizing the growth of within-group inequality is that firm-level productivity dispersion should also have increased. ...

This paper investigates the changes in the German wage structure for full– time working males from 1999 to 2006. Our analysis builds on the task–based approach introduced by Autor et al. (2003), as implemented by Spitz-Oener (2006) for Germany, and also accounts for job complexity. We perform a Blinder–Oaxaca type decomposition of the changes in the entire wage distribution between 1999 and 200...

This paper explores the macroeconomic and welfare implications of the sharp rise in US wage inequality (1967-1995). In the data, cross-sectional earnings variation increased substantially more than wage variation, due to a sharp rise in the wage-hours correlation. On the contrary, inequality in hours worked, consumption and wealth (excluding the top 1%) remained roughly constant through time. U...

Correspondence: [email protected] 1Department of Economics, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK 2Center for Research and Social Progress, Piacenza, Italy Abstract While several studies have documented the expansion of the informal sector and its detrimental impact on development, few have noted that informality and wage inequality tend to move together. Using Mexico as a case stud...

this study examins effects of trade liberalization on the wage inequality between urban and rural labor 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 quantile regression and ordinary ...