The Effects of Living Wage Laws: Evidence from Failed and Derailed Living Wage Campaigns Living wage campaigns have succeeded in about 100 jurisdictions in the United States but have also been unsuccessful in numerous cities. These unsuccessful campaigns provide a better control group or counterfactual for estimating the effects of living wage laws than the broader set of all cities without a l...

Performance pay is of growing importance to the wage structure as it applies to a rising share of employees. At the same time wage dispersion is growing continuously. This leads to the question of how the growing use of performance pay schemes is related to the increase in wage inequality? German SOEP data for the years 1984 to 2009 confirm the large increase in the application of performance p...

We analyze the following questions under imperfect labour markets. How does strategic outsourcing influence wage formation, profit sharing and employee effort when firms commit to optimal profit sharing before wage formation or decide for profit sharing after wage formation? What is the relationship between outsourcing, profit sharing, and equilibrium unemployment? We find that in both scenario...

Wage Gaps Large and Small The law of one wage does not strictly hold, nor should it be expected to hold, in contemporary labor markets. The law of one wage, however, provides a surprisingly good first approximation of the structure of U.S. wages. This generalization is drawn from research on a diverse set of topics: the Mincerian wage equation and earnings imputation, union wage differentials, ...

We study the role of labour and credit market imperfections for the determination of equilibrium unemployment. In the credit market loan contracts are negotiated between financiers and firms, both possessing bargaining power, while the firms and organized labour bargain over the base wage. The sequential labour and credit market negotiations are assumed to take place conditional on the firm hav...

The South African apartheid system formally ended with the election of the African National Congress at the first all-race elections held in 1994. As a result, racist policies such as color barring, that particularly hindered the advancement of black workers throughout the apartheid period are no longer legal. Yet the legacy of apartheid may endure as a result of both the persistence of racial ...

This paper analyses wage dynamics at individual level using the European Community Household Panel data. We compare yearly wage changes of full-time employees staying in the same ...rm for twelve European countries during the 1994-96 time-period. For all the European countries we ...nd evidence of nominal wage rigidity. The percentage of employees receiving no wage changes is di¤erent across co...

Two-digit manufacturing industry-level production functions are used to test efficiency wage propositions. Conclusive tests require functional forms which allow differences in elasticities of substitution between observable human capital, wage premia and other inputs. Results demonstrate that unexplained industry wage premia and higher unemployment rates raise productivity. Wage premia and the ...

The present paper examines a two-country model, one with flexible wage and prices (which seems to characterize most high performance East Asian economies), and the other with sticky wage and prices. Wage and prices often “over-shoot” in the flexible wage economy. The impacts of fixed and floating exchange rage regime on the flexible wage economy is typically different. A fixed (floating) exchan...

Alternative theoretical perspectives have been presented to explain internationally effective factors affecting immigration. For example, the orthodox explanation of migration is based on the concept of wage differentials as an important factor of international immigration. The world system approach declines to interpret theoretically international migration as a phenomenon between independent ...