This paper estimates how compliance with national labor law and international labor standards within Jordan's garment exporting factories changed after the implementation of a transparency program that made compliance assessments publicly available. The estimation employs data from Better Work...

By studying the factors underlying differences in trade performance across European economies, this paper derives six different 'trade models' for 22 EU-countries and explores their developmental and distributional dynamics. We first introduce a typology of trade models by clustering countries...

Collective bargaining has come under renewed scrutiny, especially in Southern European countries, which rely predominantly on sectoral bargaining supported by administrative extensions of collective agreements. Following the global financial crisis, some of these countries have implemented...

We develop a theoretically grounded extension of the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd et al. (1999) that allows firms to differ both in the wages they offer new hires and the wages required to poach their employees. Expected hiring wages are modeled as the sum of a worker fixed effect, a...

Historical estimates of workers' earnings suffer from the fundamental problem that annual incomes are inferred from day wages without knowing the length of the working year. This uncertainty raises doubts about core growth theories that rely on existing income estimates to explain the origins of...

How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals’ earnings in 31 different data sets from sixteen countries, from which...

A large and growing literature has identified several conditions, including exporting, that contribute to plant survival. A prevailing sentiment suggests that anti-sweatshop activity against plants in developing countries adds the risk of making survival more difficult by imposing external...

How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals’ earnings in 31 different data sets from sixteen countries, from which...

I describe insights into wage dynamics and downward wage rigidity obtained from more than two hundred interviews with businesspeople, labor leaders, and various labor market intermediaries and made in the early 1990s in the Northeast of the United States. I explain the morale explanation for...

Recent micro studies have documented extensive downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) for job stayers in many OECD countries, but the effect on aggregate variables remains disputed. Using data for hourly nominal wages, we explore the existence of DNWR on wages at the industry level in 19 OECD...