This paper seeks to explain the greater hours worked by Americans compared to Germans in terms of forward-looking labor supply responses to differences in earnings inequality between the countries. We argue that workers choose current hours of work to gain promotions and advance in the...

Over the last twenty years the wage-education relationships in the US and Germany have evolved very differently, while the education composition of employment has evolved in a surprisingly parallel fashion. In this paper, we propose and test an explanation to these conflicting patterns. The...

Standard models suggest that adverse labor demand shocks will lead to bigger employment losses if institutional factors like minimum wages and trade unions prevent downward wage adjustments. Some economists have argued that this insight explains the contrast between the United States, where real...

This paper investigates the effect of a large negative agricultural shock, the boll weevil, on black-white inequality in the first half of the twentieth century. To do this we use complete count census data to generate a linked sample of fathers and their sons. We find that the boll weevil...

This paper estimates the contribution of human capital, measured using both educational attainment and test performance, to the Black-white earnings gap in three separate samples of men spanning 1966 through 2017. There are three main findings. First, the magnitude of reductions in the...

This paper tests the hypotheses that overall wage compression and low female supply relative to demand reduce a country's gender pay gap. Using micro-data for 22 countries over the 1985-94 period, we find that more compressed male wage structures and lower female net supply are both associated...

This study transforms the October Inquiry' Survey of wages conducted by the International Labour Organization into a consistent data file on pay in 161 occupations in over 150 countries from 1983 to 1998 to examine the pattern of pay across occupations and countries. The new file tells us that:...

Centralized wage-setting institutions compress relative wages. Motivated by this fact, we investigate the effects of centralized wage setting on the industry distribution of employment. We examine Sweden's industry distribution from 1960 to 1994 and compare it to the U.S. distribution over the...

Greater job creation in the US than in Germany has often been related to greater wage dispersion coupled with less regulated labour and product markets in the US. Based on the Comparative German American Structural Database and the International Adult Literacy Survey we find that employment of...

The purpose of this paper was to investigate whether there is a relationship between the degree of wage dispersion in a country and its price level relative to other countries, compared in a common currency. It was found that once a country's real per capita income and deviations of its exchange...