If job searchers don't know the wage offer distribution they are facing, they might take the wage structure in their last firm as a prior. Doing so, reservation wages will be biased which will also bias unemployment duration. Using data for Austrian workers it is shown that workers seem to have...

In job-search theory, the existence of an optimal reservation wage depends crucially on the assumption of a known wage offer distribution. But in general, job searchers don't know the wage offer distribution from where they can sample. In this case, workers might take the wage structure in their...

We analyze firm size wage differentials by not only studying wage changes of workers who move between firms of different size classes but also by explicitly analyzing the underlying mobility decisions. Our analysis is based on a new data-set for Switzerland. We consider the OLS size premium as a...

We show that providing publicly available wage information in vacancies, so-called external pay transparency, can reduce the gender wage gap. There is an increasing interest in pay transparency policies as a tool to combat unequal pay. We exploit a reform of Austria's Equal Treatment Law to...

We analyze firm size wage differentials by not only studying wage changes of workers who move between firms of different size classes but also by explicitly analyzing the underlying mobility decisions. Our analysis is based on a new data-set for Switzerland. We consider the OLS size premium as a...

We evaluate whether revealing wage information in job vacancies is able to change the gender wage gap. In 2011, the Austrian Equal Treatment Law mandated every vacancy to include a minimum wage offer. This mandatory wage information makes the employer's willingness to pay and the value of...

We show that providing publicly available wage information in vacancies, so-called external pay transparency, can reduce the gender wage gap. There is an increasing interest in pay transparency policies as a tool to combat unequal pay. We exploit a reform of Austria’s Equal Treatment Law to...

We show that providing publicly available wage information in vacancies, so-called external pay transparency, can reduce the gender wage gap. There is an increasing interest in pay transparency policies as a tool to combat unequal pay. We exploit a reform of Austria's Equal Treatment Law to...

Decomposing wages into worker and firm wage components, we find that firm-fixed components (firm rents) are sizeable parts of workers' wages. If workers can only imperfectly observe the extent of firm rents in their wages, they might be mislead about the overall wage distribution. Such...