Abstract—This paper uses a primary data from 670 Chinese manufacturing firms, together with the newly introduced regressionbased inequality decomposition method, to study the effect of openness on wage inequality. We find that openness leads to a positive industry wage premium, but its contribution to firm-level wage inequality is relatively small, only 4.69%. The major contributor to wage ineq...

How Tax Progression Affects Effort and Employment Within an efficiency wage framework, we study the effects of two revenue-neutral tax reforms that change the progressivity of the labour tax system. A revenue-neutral increase in both the wage tax and tax exemption and a revenue-neutral change in the composition of labour taxation towards the tax with the smaller tax base will lead to the same r...

Since Friedman (1968), the traditional derivation of the accelerationist Phillips curve has related expected real wage inflation to the unemployment rate and then invoked markup pricing and adaptive expectations to generate the accelerationist price inflation equation. Blanchflower and Oswald (1994) have argued that microeconomic evidence of a low autoregression coefficient in real wage regress...

We consider efficiency wage effects in a union-firm bargaining model with private information. We show that an increase in the efficiency wage effects does not necessarily increase the wage level at equilibrium, even when the wage bargaining with private information is close to one with complete information. However, if it is commonly known that the firm is stronger than the union and the deman...

Theories of turnover and wage dynamics have studied the impact of wage levels on turnover, but they have failed explicitly to model the role of wage growth in predicting turnover. This article presents a theory of turnover that explains why within-job wage growth reduces the likelihood of worker-firm separations. The model determines the evolution of value among jobs that differ systematically ...

Real wage growth in the UK labour market, since around 2003, has slowed down and stagnated. In this paper, we document the nature of real wage changes across the wage distribution over the last three decades, showing that the recent period of stagnant real wage growth represents a distinct break of trend that pre-dates the onset of recession. We explore whether unemployment has become a stronge...

Social Comparisons of Wage Increases and Job Satisfaction* We combine status quo and social comparison considerations and investigate whether relative wage increases in the sense of differences between individual wage increases and wage increases of comparable employees are related to managers’ job satisfaction. Using a panel data set of managers in the German chemical industry, we indeed find ...

Unions, Wage Gaps, and Wage Dispersion: New Evidence from the Americas Using a common methodology, the effects of unions on wage levels and wage dispersion are estimated for two neighboring countries, Bolivia and Chile, and for the U.S. The analysis shows that unions have broadly similar effects on the wage distribution within these three economies. The findings suggest that the political econo...

Job and Wage Mobility in a Search Model with Non-Compliance (Exemptions) with the Minimum Wage How well does a simple search on-the-job model fit the eighteen years of job and wage mobility of high school graduates? To answer this question we are confronted from the data with a prevalent non-compliance and exemptions from the minimum wage. We incorporate this observation in a job search model w...