This article provides a comprehensive analysis of labor earnings volatility in Brazil between 2012 and 2023. During this period, Brazil's economy experienced intense economic growth followed by large recessions, allowing us to assess changes in volatility over the business cycle. In addition,...

This study documents the evolution of minimum wages bargained in Italian private sector collective contracts over a forty-year period (1983-2023). Minimum wages have grown in real levels over the last three decades, particularly among high-skilled occupations, but this growth has been partially...

The average gender pay gap in Germany is 16 percent according to the most recent data. On the occasion of the 2025 Equal Pay Day, this Weekly Report using Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data shows that considerable differences according to age and level of education are hiding behind this average...

This study examines the impact of domestic outsourcing on the wages of workers performing outsourced tasks in Türkiye, using an administrative employee-employer linked dataset. Outsourcing events are identified by tracking worker flows across firms with specific properties. Unlike existing...

We use novel surveys of firms and workers, linked to administrative employer-employee data, to study the prevalence and importance of individual bargaining in wage determination. We show that simple survey questions accurately elicit firms' bargaining strategies. Using the elicited strategies...

This paper examines how offshoring affects worker skill demands and studies its implications for wage inequality. Using Danish administrative data, we find that offshoring increases firm-level demand for higher skills in occupations with high exposure to foreign competition. This effect is more...

Using linked employer-employee data from Brazil, we document a large gender pay gap due to women working at lower-paying employers. To interpret this fact, we develop an equilibrium search model with endogenous firm pay, amenities, and hiring. We provide a constructive proof of identification of...

We study the role of union heterogeneity in shaping wages and inequality among unionized workers. Using linked employer-employee data from Brazil and job moves across multi-firm unions, we estimate over 4,800 union-specific pay premia. Unions explain 3-4% of earnings variation. While unions...

This study analyzes the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on wage inequality in Vietnam by utilizing panel data from 63 provinces over the period 2010-2018. The spatial autocorrelation model is used in the study. Empirical results from the spatial econometric model reveal that FDI tends...

Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and...

Wage mobility reduces the persistence of wage inequality. We develop a framework to quantify the contribution of employer-to-employer movers to aggregate wage mobility. Using three decades of German social security data, we find that inequality increased while aggregate wage mobility decreased....

Wage mobility reduces the persistence of wage inequality. We develop a framework to quantify the contribution of employer-to-employer movers to aggregate wage mobility. Using three decades of German social security data, we find that inequality increased while aggregate wage mobility decreased....

This working paper presents a comparative analysis of the role played by occupational changes in recent wage inequality trends in six European countries between 2002 and 2018. Using the European Union Structure of Earnings Survey, the analysis shows two patterns in the share of wage inequality...

We examine the development of worker-firm matching over the career due to job mobility. Using administrative employer-employee data covering the universe of German employees, we measure the degree of assortative matching as the correlation of worker and firm quality measures obtained from a wage...

Labor market tightness tremendously increased in Germany between 2012 and 2022. We analyze the effect of tightness on wages by combining social security data with unusually rich information on vacancies and job seekers. Instrumental variable regressions reveal positive elasticities between 0.004...

Using a cross-sectional dataset of 13 manufacturing sectors in 27 Asian developing countries from 2008 to 2022, we investigated the impact of the presence of foreign firms on wages of workers from domestic firms. First, we found that the average wage of workers from foreign firms is higher than...

This study investigates the dynamics of between-group and within-group wage inequality in a model with heterogeneous learning abilities putting a key emphasis on the shape of the ability distribution. In our model, intergenerational human capital externalities incentivize individuals to invest...

A main driver of the gender wage gap is that women earn a lower firm-specific wage premium than men. We document the role of flexible wage components in driving both within-firm and between-firm gender differences in firm premia. For this purpose, we link wage survey data on performance payments...

This paper assesses the impact of a large expansion of public childcare in Germany on wage inequality. Exploiting regional variation in childcare supply over the 1990s, I show that in regions with stronger increases in childcare, wage inequality among women increased less strongly compared to...

We study the effects of robot penetration on household income inequality in 14 European countries between 2006-2018, a period of rapid adoption of industrial robots. Automation reduced relative hourly wages and employment of more exposed demographic groups, similarly to the results for the US....

We examine the development of worker-firm matching over the career due to job mobility. Using administrative employer-employee data covering the universe of German employees, we measure the degree of assortative matching as the correlation of worker and firm quality measures obtained from an AKM...

Using plant-level data from the Annual Survey of Industries, this study presents an empirical analysis of the effects of global value chains (GVCs) on employment and wage premiums in the Indian manufacturing sector. We emphasize the GVC's impact on three labor market variables: (i) employment,...

In this paper, I study the impact of financial integration on between-firm wage inequality using an unbalanced panel for 20 European countries over the period 1999-2021. With the impulse response functions estimated using local projections, I find that financial integration, as measured by the...

New hand-collected school administrative data from 1870s Virginia, alongside linked individual US Censusrecords, reveals that temporary school closures had lasting effects on literacy and income in adulthood. Those affected by the closures had lower intergenerational economic mobility,...

Using nationally representative data on employment and earnings, this paper documents a fall in wage inequality in India over the last two decades. It then examines the role played by increasing minimum wages for the lowest skilled workers in India in contributing to the observed decline....

A growing empirical literature attributes much of the productivity advantages of large, "superstar" firms to their adoption of best practice management techniques that allow them to better identify and use talented workers. The reasons for the incomplete adoption of these "structured management...

What are the implications of (endogenous) directed technical change for the design of redistributive income taxes? I study this question in a Mirrleesian economy augmented to include endogenous technology development and adoption choices by firms. Under certain conditions, any progressive tax...

This paper primarily studies how wages predict long-term absenteeism in enterprises. In addition, it studies who disappears from the workforce when downsizing. Analyzing Norwegian enterprise data using dynamic unconditional quasi-maximum likelihood fixed-effects panel regression and general...

This paper estimates the returns to education and their implications for wage inequality using data from the 2015/16 Namibia Income and Expenditure Survey. The paper employs recentred influence function regression to analyse the impact of education across the wage distribution and uses a...

Education has long been perceived as a great equalizer, but even with universal rises in schooling years, income distribution worsened world-wide. We propose a method for decomposing the contribution of a variable to the change in inequality into mean, dispersion, and price components. The...

Does competition in the labor market affect wage inequality? Standard textbook monopsony models predict that lower employer labor market power reduces wage dispersion. We test this hypothesis using Social Security data from Lithuania. We first fit a two-way fixed effects model to quantify the...