Using administrative payroll data from the largest US processing company, we measure extent of nominal wage rigidity in United States. The allow us to define a worker’s per-period base contract separately other forms compensation such as overtime premiums and bonuses. We provide evidence that firms use wages cyclically adjust marginal cost their workers. Nominal declines are much rarer than pre...

Why Are the Returns to Education Higher for Entrepreneurs than for Employees? We compare the returns to education (RTE) for entrepreneurs and employees, based on 19 waves of the NLSY database. By using instrumental variable techniques (IV) and taking account of selectivity, we find that the RTE are significantly higher for entrepreneurs than for employees (18.3 percent and 9.9 percent, respecti...

This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that income and consumption inequality in Poland increased substantially following the economic transition in 1989–90. Using microdata from the 1985–92 Household Budget Surveys, we find that overall income inequality increased in 1989 but subsequently declined to pretransition levels. The distribution of consumption reveals a similar pattern. Social...

Causal Returns to Schooling and Individual Heterogeneity E-mail: In this paper, human capital investments are evaluated by assuming heterogeneous returns to schooling. We use the potential outcome approach to measure the causal effect of human capital investments on earnings as a continuous treatment effect. Empirical evidence is based on a sample of West German full-time employed males (BIBB/I...

We analyze a model in which workers must be allocated to tasks to produce. There are differences among the workers in absolute ability that are independent of the activity they perform. We demonstrate a unique competitive equilibrium that determines both wages and the allocation of workers to tasks. The equilibrium wage has the property that workers assigned to the lowest ‘‘value-added’’ tasks ...

Using data drawn from the Canadian, Mexican, and U.S. censuses, we find a numerically comparable and statistically significant inverse relation between immigrant-induced shifts in labor supply and wages in each of the three countries: A 10% labor supply shift is associated with a 3%-4% oppositesigned change in wages. Despite the similarity in the wage response, the impact of migration on the wa...

This article examines how research productivity, administrative service, and teaching affect reputational capital in the market for academic economists. Also, we investigate the issue of the durability of reputational capital, estimating the penalties associated with gaps in research output. Our results reveal that (1) the market makes a distiniction between the quantity and the quality of an i...

A modelling framework is developed for describing income-age trajectories that is useful for summarizing not only the average profile for a group of individuals with similar characteristics, but also how individual trajectories differ from the group average. Using data from waves 1-17 of the British Household Panel Survey, the model is estimated separately for twelve groups of individuals diffe...

In this paper we derive a model for the joint endogeneity of centrally contracted wages and wage drift in which central union attempts to reduce wage dispersion plays a pivotal role. Empirical results demonstrate that union efforts to level wage differentials exerted large positive effects on both centrally negotiated wage changes and wage drift. We also show that wage drift was accurately pred...

Do Literacy and Numeracy Pay Off? On the Relationship between Basic Skills and Earnings Is there a reward for basic skills in the German labor market? To answer this question, we examine the relationship between literacy, numeracy and monthly gross earnings of full-time employed workers. We use data from the ALWA survey, augmented by test scores on basic cognitive skills as well as administrati...