We build an equilibrium model of a small open economy with labor market frictions and imperfectly enforced regulations. Heterogeneous firms sort into the formal or informal sector. We estimate the model using data from Brazil, and use counterfactual simulations to understand how trade affects...

We build an equilibrium model of a small open economy with labor market frictions and imperfectly enforced regulations. Heterogeneous firms sort into the formal or informal sector. We estimate the model using data from Brazil, and use counterfactual simulations to understand how trade affects...

Das im vorliegenden Bericht beschriebene Forschungsprojekt zum Thema "Auswirkungen des gesetzlichen Mindestlohns auf Löhne und Arbeitszeiten" zielt auf die Evaluation der Mindestlohneinführung und -erhöhung hinsichtlich Veränderungen von Löhnen und Arbeitszeiten ab. Das Projekt wurde im...

Wage inequality has risen in many countries over recent decades. At the same time, production has become increasingly concentrated in "superstar" firms. In this paper, we show that these two phenomena are linked. Theoretically, we show that shocks that increase concentration, such as an increase...

Using the 2010 and 2014 data from the China Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this paper analyzes the effect of human capital on the gender earnings gap, both within cohorts and across cohorts using regression, Oaxaca-Blinder, and Juhn-Murphy-Pierce decomposition analyses. On the one hand, over the...

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, technological change has led to the automation of existing tasks and the creation of new ones, as well as the reallocation of labor across occupations and industries. These processes have been costly to individual workers, but labor demand has...

Income inequality has been lower in periods when trade unionism has been strong. Using observations on wages by occupation, by geography, and by gender in collective bargaining contracts from the 1940s to the 1970s, patterns in movements of wage differentials are revealed. As wages increased,...

We examine gender gaps in career dynamics in the legal sector using rich panel data from one of the largest global law firms in the world. The law firm studied is representative of multinational law firms and operates in 23 countries. The sample includes countries at different stages of...

Inaccurate expectations of future wages are found in many contexts. Yet, existing studies overwhelmingly refer to high-income countries, and there is little evidence regarding the sources of expectational errors. Based on a longitudinal survey of graduates from the six largest universities in...

This paper presents an Agent-Based Model (ABM) that seeks to explain the concordance of sluggish growth of productivity and of real wages found in macro-economic statistics, and the increased dispersion of firm productivity and worker earnings found in micro level statistics in advanced...

Labor market opportunities and wages may be unfair for various reasons, and how workers respond to different types of unfairness can have major economic consequences. Using an online labor platform, where workers engage in an individual task for a piece-rate wage, we investigate the causal...

We use distributional regression analysis to study the impact of a six percent increase in the Irish minimum wage on the distribution of hourly wages and household income. Wage inequality, measured by the ratio of wages in the 90th and 10th percentiles and the 75th and 25th percentiles,...

A large body of literature estimates the relative wage impacts of immigration on low- and high-skill natives, but it is unclear how these effects map onto changes of the wage distribution. I document the movement of foreign-born workers in the U.S. wage distribution, showing that, since 1980,...

Using quantile regression methods, this paper analyses the gender wage gap across the wage distribution and over time (1990-2014), while controlling for changing sample selection into full-time employment. Our findings show that the selection-corrected gender wage gap is much larger than the...

Using population-wide Swedish register data on cognitive abilities and productive personality traits, we show that employment growth has been monotonically skill-biased in terms of these general-purpose intellectual skills, despite a simultaneous (polarizing) decline in middle-wage jobs....

We set up a trade model with two countries, two sectors, and one production factor, which features a home-market effect due to the existence of trade costs. We consider search frictions and firm-level wage bargaining in the sector producing differentiated goods and a perfectly competitive labor...

This paper evaluates the effect of foreign takeover on wages of workers in German establishments, using rich linked employer-employee data from 2003 to 2014. To identify a causal effect of foreign takeover, we combine propensityscore matching with a difference-in-difference estimator. We find...

This paper examines how employee earnings at small firms respond to a cash flow shock in the form of a government R&D grant. We use ranking data on applicant firms, which we link to IRS W2 earnings and other U.S. Census Bureau datasets. In a regression discontinuity design, we find that the...

We use the LASSO estimator to select among a large number of explanatory variables in wage regressions for a decomposition of the gender wage gap. The LASSO selection with a one standard error rule removes about a quarter of the regressors. We use the LASSO-selected regressors for OLSbased...

This paper is an application of a new Shapley income decomposition methodology, in which we isolate two subjective factors in income differences - race and gender - that contribute to income inequality within the population of blacks and whites in the United States over the period 2005-2017. We...

While general ethnic disadvantages are well documented, much less is known about coinciding disadvantages of ethnic origin and gender. Based on theoretical arguments of human capital theory, sociocultural approaches, labour market segmentation theory, and discrimination mechanisms, we...

We use an extensive, matched employer-employee dataset to analyze the employersize wage relation and its contribution to wage inequality in Germany. Applying models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments, we document that the large firm wage premium, which has risen over 25...

Using representative linked employer-employee data for Germany, this paper analyzes short- and long-run differences in labor market performance of workers joining start-ups instead of incumbent firms. Applying entropy balancing and following individuals over ten years, we find huge and...

We propose a theoretical framework to analyze the offshoring and reshoring decisions of firms in the age of automation. Our theory suggests that increasing productivity in automation leads to a relocation of previously offshored production back to the home economy but without improving...

Wage inequality has risen in many countries over recent decades. At the same time, production has become increasingly concentrated in "superstar" firms. In this paper, we show that these two phenomena are linked. Theoretically, we show that shocks that increase concentration, such as an increase...

We show that the discontinuity in the distribution of surveyed female income shares at the margin where a woman would outearn her partner is primarily driven by norm induced misreporting in surveys. We draw on unique Swiss data combining survey and administrative information for the same...

Labor market opportunities and wages may be unfair for various reasons, and how workers respond to different types of unfairness can have major economic consequences. Using an online labor platform, where workers engage in an individual task for a piece-rate wage, we investigate the causal...

This paper analyses gender differences in pay at the mean as well as along the wage distribution. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the adjusted gender pay gap applying a machine learning method (post-double-LASSO procedure). Comparing results from this method to...

We exploit the construction of the Öresund bridge, which connects a medium-sized city in Sweden to the capital of Denmark, to study the labor market effects of gaining access to a larger labor market. Using unique cross-country matched registry data that allow us to follow individuals across...

We compare wages in multinational enterprises (MNEs) versus domestic firms, the earnings of domestic firm workers with past, future and no MNE experience, and estimate how the presence of ex-MNE peers affects the earnings of domestic firm employees. The analysis relies on monthly panel data...

This paper studies how a positive export shock - the sharp increase in garment-sector exports that began at the end of the Multifibre Arrangement (MFA) - spread through Bangladesh's labor markets. Although the end of the MFA was arguably exogenous to Bangladesh, we instrument export demand with...

We explore the nonprofit earnings penalty. To separate the influence of demand and supply, we leverage workers who change employers in administrative tax data. The average nonprofit worker earns 5.5 percent less than the average for-profit worker. Supply-side factors (worker selection)...

Franziska Bernadette Hampf prepared this study while she was working at the ifo Center for the Economics of Education. The study was completed in September 2019 and accepted as doctoral thesis by the Department of Economics at the University of Munich. It consists of four distinct empirical...

We estimate how much firms differentiate pay premia between regular and outsourced workers. We study temp agency work arrangements where pay setting has previously escaped measurement because existing datasets do not report links between user firms (the workplaces where temp workers perform...

This paper studies the impact of labor market conditions during the education-to-work transition on workers' long-term skill development. Using representative survey data on measures of work-relevant cognitive skills for adults from 19 countries, I document four main findings: i) cohorts of...