How individual wages change with time, and how they are expected to change as individuals grow older, is one of crucial determinants of their behaviour on the labour market including their decision to retire. The profile of individual hourly wages has for a long time been assumed to follow an...

This paper proposes a new mechanism linking trade and wage inequality in developing countries the quality-upgrading mechanism and investigates its empirical implications in panel data on Mexican manufacturing plants. In a model with heterogeneous plants and quality-differentiated goods, only the...

We show theoretically that when larger firms pay higher wages and are more likely to be caught defaulting on labour taxes, then large high-wage firms will be in the formal sector and small low-wage firms will be in the informal sector. The formal sector wage premium is thus just a firm size wage...

This paper uses matched employer-employee panel data to show that individual job satisfaction is higher when other workers in the same establishment are better-paid. This runs contrary to a large literature which has found evidence of income comparisons in subjective well-being. We argue that...

Korea is known not only for rapid economic growth but also relatively low wage inequality. It is one of the few countries in which wage inequality decreased during the 1980s, though in recent years wage inequality has increased. This paper studies what factors contributed to the changes in wage...

Austria is among the very few countries in the European Union which have managed to maintain comparatively low unemployment rates and high employment rates. In international comparison Austrian unemployment is very stable over the business cycle. This is mainly due to the high sensitivity of the...

Previous study by Card and Lewis (2005) has found (puzzling) that inflows of Mexican immigrants into new metropolitan areas have had no effect on the relative wages of very low-skill (high school dropouts). Rather, Mexican workers do affect relative wages for high school graduates. Whereas Card...

We study experimentally the relationship between intra-firm wage dispersion chosen by principals and workers' performance. Principals show a preference for more egalitarian wage schemes, and workers are negatively influenced by high levels of wage inequality.

In this paper we examine the relationship between computer premium and job position in Austria. We estimate cross-section wage equations and control for selectivity of computer use via a treatment effects model. We find that the size of the wage effect attributed to computer use varies...

This paper seeks to contribute to the ongoing controversy on the distributional effects of structural reforms in developing countries. Applying inequality indices and Fields’ (2001) decomposition methodology to Bolivian household survey data of the years 1989 to 1997, we identify recent trends...