Duflo (2001) exploits a 1970s schooling expansion in Indonesia to estimate the returns to schooling. Under the study's difference-in-differences (DID) design, two patterns in the data-shallower pay scales for younger workers and negative selection in treatment-can violate the parallel trends...

This paper investigates the relationship between the spatial distribution of occupations with a high content of peer interactions and wages among Italian provinces. At this aim, we use a unique employer-employee dataset obtained by merging administrative data on wages and labor market histories...

We study the economic impact of becoming a taxi driver. Comparing individuals who pass the necessary written exams for a taxi driver's license to individuals who have not yet done so, we find that both immigrants and natives who enter into taxi driving have experienced negative employment...

This study examines an initiative by a large multinational garment retailer (H&M Group) to increase wages at its supplier factories by intervening in their wage-related management practices. Difference-in-differences estimates based on eight years of data from over 1,800 factories show that the...

This paper investigates the effects of the introduction of a statutory minimum wage in Germany on the wages and employment of migrants. Migrants are an overrepresented group in the low-wage sector and can be expected to particularly benefit from a minimum wage. We combine a “differential trend...

This paper explores gender wage dynamics using an administrative dataset covering Irish graduate earnings from 2010-2020. Our data allows us to look at a broad range of degrees and compare workers who are identical in important observable characteristics. We find that although male and female...

Hurricanes that make landfall cause significant upheaval, with recovery often requiring substantial resources. Appropriately sizing and allocating those resources requires knowledge, not only of the overall effects of a hurricane, but also of the differential effects across impacted areas. We...

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...

Rolling waves of consolidation have significantly decreased the number of hospital systems in the U.S. potentially affecting industry quality, prices, efficiency, wages and more. This research concerns the growth in hospital system consolidation in local labor markets and its effect on...

This paper uses new data to study school management and productivity in India. We report four main results. First, management quality in public schools is low, and ~2σ below high-income countries with comparable data. Second, private schools have higher management quality, driven by much...

While U.S. legislation prohibits employers from sharing information about their employees’ compensation with each other, companies are still allowed to acquire and use more aggregated data provided by third parties. Most medium and large firms report using this type of data to set salaries, a...

High-tenure workers losing their job experience a large and prolonged fall in wages and earnings. The aim of this paper is to understand and quantify the forces behind this empirical regularity. We propose a structural model of the labor market with (i) on-the-job search, (ii) general human...

Widening income inequality is a serious social concern in many countries. We examine the causal effect of a negative demand shock on executive compensation and worker wages using a quasi-natural experiment, considering Japanese firms that experienced a sudden and substantial export decline...

Using information from two complementary household survey data sets, we show that the dominant form of labor market adjustment in the Russian transition process has been the delayed receipt of wages. More than half the workforce is experiencing some form of disruption to their pay. Wage arrears...

Using a large new dataset, we analyze the labor market performance of Portuguese workers in Germany. While previous work compares wages and characteristics of migrants only to those of the natives, we match the data also with an equivalent survey from the sending country. We find that Portuguese...

Rolling waves of consolidation have significantly decreased the number of hospital systems in the U.S. potentially affecting industry quality, prices, efficiency, wages and more. This research concerns the growth in hospital system consolidation in local labor markets and its effect on...

This paper studies if workers infer from correlation about causal effects in the context of the part-time wage penalty. Differences in hourly pay between full-time and part-time workers are strongly driven by worker selection and systematic sorting. Ignoring these selection effects can lead to...

Wages growth in Australia was lower than expected prior to COVID-19 based on historical determinants. One possible explanation for this is that employment had become more concentrated among a small number of large employers. This reduced outside options for workers and lowered their bargaining...

This study's main objective is assessing the effects of innovation on firms' employment growth. Further, we aimed to examine the quality of jobs in terms of skills and wages. By applying a structural modeling ap- proach, four types of innovation were considered-namely, product, process,...

Wages and productivity represent two of the most relevant variables to consider in economic development. Given the low productivity levels that emerging countries reveal, the accumulation of productive capabilities and a narrower dispersion across sectors would enable emerging countries to...

In this study, we examine the relationship between within-firm pay inequality and employee productivity. We use hand-collected data on a sample of S&P 1500 companies from 2018-2022 and find a concave relationship between the relative CEO pay and employee productivity. Consistent with tournament...

Specialisation in value-chain functions is one of the new phenomena introduced by global value chains (GVCs). This report investigates the effects of functional specialisation on labour markets in fabrication and R&D activities as the two polar cases of value-chain functions, whereby the former...

We consider a model of executive compensation in which CEOs have power to influence their compensation and test its implications using CEO compensation data from Execucomp. In the proposed model, CEOs endogenously determine their equity and salary compensation by maximizing the expected utility...

Earnings risk is central to economic analysis. While this risk is essentially subjective, it is typically inferred from administrative data. Following the lead of Dominitz and Manski (1997), we introduce a survey instrument to measure subjective earnings risk. We pay particular attention to the...

How do inexperienced consumers learn to use a new financial technology? We present results from a field experiment that introduced payroll accounts in a population of largely unbanked factory workers in Bangladesh. In the experiment, workers in a treatment group received monthly wage payments...

We examine the effect of elite connections on CEO pay and turnover decisions, using a large sample of Chinese listed firms. Our findings show that CEOs of private listed firms benefit from significantly higher salaries (a 25% increase), consistent with the resource dependence theory, whereas the...

We characterize a measure of social welfare for linear production economies in which individuals differ in productive skills and preferences. The key feature of our measure is that it aggregates fairness gaps, defined as the difference between the money-metric utility that the individual...

This paper studies if workers infer from correlation about causal effects in the context of the part-time wage penalty. Differences in hourly pay between full-time and part-time workers are strongly driven by worker selection and systematic sorting. Ignoring these selection effects can lead to...

Job levels summarize the complexity, autonomy, and responsibility of task execution. Conceptually, job levels are related to the organization of production, are distinct from occupations, and can be constructed from data on task execution. We highlight their empirical role in matched...

Job levels summarize the complexity, autonomy, and responsibility of task execution. Conceptually, job levels are related to the organization of production, are distinct from occupations, and can be constructed from data on task execution. We highlight their empirical role in matched...

We examine whether management earnings forecasts (MEFs) help reduce the stock return seasonality associated with earnings seasonality around earnings announcements (EAs) in Chinese A-share markets. We find that firms in historically low earnings seasons outperform firms in high earnings seasons...

The use of social contacts in the labor market is widespread. This paper investigates the impact of personal connections on hiring probabilities and re-employment outcomes of displaced workers in Portugal. We rely on rich matched employer-employee data to define personal connections that arise...

Wage growth is stronger in larger cities, but this relationship holds exclusively for non-manual workers. Using rich German administrative data, I study the heterogeneity in the pecuniary value of big city experience, a measure of dynamic agglomeration economies, and its consequences for the...