Wages and wage determination

Welfare-to-Work, Wages and Wage Growth

This paper attempts to uncover the effects of a welfare-to-work programme, that acts as a wage subsidy, on wage growth by exploiting an expansion to this welfare programme in the UK. The conventional wisdom is that such programmes trap recipients into low wage, low quality work – this comes from the simple argument that the “poverty trap”, which a wage subsidy for low income workers, induces re...

Nominal Wages . the Nairu and Wage Flexibility

Do Co-Workers’ Wages Matter? Theory and Evidence on Wage Secrecy, Wage Compression and Effort

Do Co-Workers’ Wages Matter? Theory and Evidence on Wage Secrecy, Wage Compression and Effort We study worker and firm behavior in an environment where worker effort could depend on co-workers’ wages. Theoretically, we show that an increase in workers’ ‘concerns’ with coworkers’ wages should lead profit-maximizing firms to compress wages under quite general conditions. However, firms should be ...

Rural Hospital Wages and the Area Wage Index

We examined data on hospital hourly wages and the prospective payment system (PPS) wage index from 1990 to 1997, to determine if incremental changes to the index have improved its precision and equity as a regional cost adjuster. The differential between average rural and urban PPS hourly wages has declined by almost one-fourth over the 8-year study period. Nearly one-half of the decrease is at...

Discrimination and Efficiency Wages: Estimates of the Role of Efficiency Wages in MaleFernale Wage Differentials

R ecent work on efficiency wage models has increased our understanding of discrimination, as well as the operation of labor markets (Bulow and Summers [1986]; Bowles [19851; and Akerlof [19841). Bulow and Summers [I9861 developed an efficiency wage model of labor markets that has direct implications for discrimination. They argued that the wage premia necessary to keep males and females from sh...