Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1988–90), the author investigates the relationship between methods of pay, including piece rates and bonuses, and the level and variance of wages. Among men, piece rate workers earned a premium compared to other workers, but the...

With data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics I show that individuals in performance pay jobs were much less likely to be unemployed at the time of the interview than those in “fixed” wage jobs during the 2008 recession. While their unemployment rate is always lower in non-recession...

We begin with two uncontroversial hypotheses - firm productivity is expensive to measure and employment entails relationship-specific investments. These assumptions imply that firms would optimally choose fixed-wage contracts, and complement these with bonus pay when measuring employee...

Approximately 1million French-Canadians moved to the United States, mainly between 1865 and 1930, and most settled in neighboring New England. In 1900 almost a fifth of all persons born in French Canada lived in the U.S. These migrants exerted considerable efforts to maintain their language and...

Using data from the PSID and an empirical setup similar to the one used in Altonji and Pierret (Q J Econ 116(1):313–350, <CitationRef CitationID="CR1">2001</CitationRef>)’s paper on wages and employer learning, we find that the coefficient of a hard-to-observe correlate of productivity—parents’ educational attainment—in a wage...</citationref>

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979-96) and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1981-91), I seek to determine whether there is any net positive return to tenure with the current employer once we control for industry-specific capital. Including total experience in the...

An increasing fraction of jobs in the U.S. labor market explicitly pay workers for their performance using bonus pay, commissions, or piece-rate contracts. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that compensation in performance-pay jobs is more closely tied to both observed...

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this article examines the impact of employer-provided training on the wage profile and on the mobility of young workers. The main results are that training with the current employer has a positive effect on the wage; employers seem to...

We develop a model in which a worker's skills determine the worker's current wage and sector. The market and the worker are initially uncertain about some of the worker's skills. Endogenous wage changes and sector mobility occur as labor market participants learn about these unobserved skills....