This paper investigates the impact of international trade on wage dispersion in a small open economy, Belgium. It is one of the few to: (i) use detailed, matched employer-employee data to compute industry wage premia and disaggregated industry-level panel data to examine the impact of changes in...

This article examines the relationship between institutions and the remuneration of different jobs by comparing the German and Belgian labour markets with respect to a typology of institutions (social representations, norms, conventions, legislation and organizations). The observed institutional...

In order to facilitate employment adjustment by firms and to reduce the unemployment rate, legislation regarding temporary employment has been relaxed in Belgium (as in most European countries) over the last 20 years. Accordingly, the share of temporary employment as a percentage of total...

Conventional models of earnings assume that the occupational pay structure reflects the distribution of marginal productivities. Although ubiquitious in the literature, the underlying hypothesis that wages equal marginal products rests on weak empirical footing: extant studies from the 1970s...

This article investigates the impact of wage dispersion on firm productivity in different working environments. More precisely, it examines the interaction with: (i) the skills of the workforce, using a more appropriate indicator than the standard distinction between white- and blue-collar...