Low unionization rates, a falling real federal minimum wage, and prevalent non-competes characterize low-wage jobs in the United States and contribute to growing inequality. In recent years, a number of private employers have opted to institute or raise company-wide minimum wages for their...

Refugees, and immigrants more generally, often do not have access to all jobs in the labor market. We argue that restrictions on employment opportunities help explain why immigrants have lower employment and wages than native citizens. To test this hypothesis, we leverage refugees' exogenous...

Refugees, and immigrants more generally, often do not have access to all jobs in the labor market. We argue that restrictions on employment opportunities help explain why immigrants have lower employment and wages than native citizens. To test this hypothesis, we leverage refugees' exogenous...

This study examines the extent and influence of occupational licensing in the U.S. using a specially designed national labor force survey. Specifically, we provide new ways of measuring occupational licensing and consider what types of regulatory requirements and what level of government...

This study examines the extent and influence of occupational licensing in the U.S. using a specially designed national labor force survey. Specifically, we provide new ways of measuring occupational licensing and consider what types of regulatory requirements and what level of government...

We analyze the impact of occupational deregulation on the wages of licensed workers. To do so, we exploit a deregulation policy in the German craft sector that removed the master certificate as a requirement for starting a business in about half of the craft occupations. Specifically, we examine...

Overeducation-the situation in which an individual has more schooling than is needed to do one's job-has been researched extensively for nearly three decades, but some major issues in regard to it are still topics of ongoing debate. By using a panel data, that combines a survey of two cohorts of...

Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage. In particular, low-paid workers underestimate wages elsewhere. We document this anchoring bias by eliciting workers' beliefs in a representative survey in Germany and comparing them to measures of actual outside...

In the context of the debate on the labour-market consequences of globalisation, we examine worker mobility in order to identify the wage differences between foreign and domestic firms. Using matched employer-employee panel data for Portugal, we consider virtually all spells of interfirm...

Does the labor market place wage premia on jobs that involve physical strain, job insecurity or bad regulation of hours? This paper derives bounds on the monetary returns to these job disamenities in the West German labor market. We show that in a market with dispersion in both job...