Empirical labor economists have resorted to estimating the responsiveness of workers' wages on firms' ability to pay to assess the extent to which employers share rents with their employees. This paper compares this labor economics approach with two other approaches that rely on standard micro...

Researchers contributing to the empirical rent-sharing literature have typically resorted to estimating the responsiveness of workers' wages on firms' ability to pay in order to assess the extent to which employers share rents with their employees. This paper compares rent-sharing estimates...

We decompose the wage premium after foreign acquisitions of Dutch domestic firms into the constituent firm- and worker-level premia. Firm-level premia grow up to 3.5%, accounting for the majority of the acquisition premium. Worker-level premia by contrast, grow up to 1% and only materialize with...

In this paper I explore optimal employment contract design in a random search framework, where workers search on and off the job for employment opportunities similar to that of Lentz (2010) and Bagger and Lentz (2013). The worker determines the frequency by which employment opportunities arrive...

We provide new estimates of the return to job seniority using data similar to that used by Abraham and Farber (1987), Altonji and Shakotko (1987) and Topel (1991) as well as a new PSID sample. Topel's use of a wage and a tenure that refer to different years, his use of the Current Population...

This paper develops a framework to understand the role of interpersonal interactions in the labor market including task assignment and wages. Effective interpersonal interactions involve caring, to establish cooperation, and at the same time directness, to communicate in an unambiguous way. The...

We provide evidence that US workers face a wage-effort offer curve with the high-wage high-effort jobs occurring in the capital intensive sectors. We find that real wage offers rose at every level of effort during the 1960's, a shift which is consistent with a decline in the rental cost of...

Using a matched employer-employee data set of manufacturing plants in three sub-Saharan countries, I compare the marginal productivity of different categories of workers with the wages they earn. Under certain conditions, the wage premiums for worker characteristics should equal the productivity...

This paper develops a new framework for examining the distributional consequences of trade liberalization that is consistent with increasing inequality in every country, growth in residual wage inequality, rising unemployment, and reallocation within and between industries. While the opening of...