This article brings a new perspective to the analysis of the wage effects of the Mariel boatlift crisis, in which an estimated 125,000 Cuban refugees migrated to Florida between April and October, 1980. The author revisits the question of wage impacts from such a supply shock, drawing on the cumulative insights of research on the economic impact of immigration. That literature shows that the wa...

As a result of increasing competition, European financial intermediaries have had to place an increasing emphasis on reducing total costs. Although expenditure on wages represent a major element of these costs there is a dearth of studies analyzing wage levels in the sector. This paper examines reservation wage levels in the financial services sector by utilizing OLS and stochastic frontier met...

Do Students Expect Compensation for Wage Risk? We use a unique data set about the wage distribution that Swiss students expect for themselves ex ante, deriving parametric and non-parametric measures to capture expected wage risk. These wage risk measures are unfettered by heterogeneity which handicapped the use of actual market wage dispersion as risk measure in earlier studies. Students in our...

In this paper, we present a cooperative model of a hierarchically structured firm to study wage differences between different levels in such a firm. We consider a class of wage functions that are based on marginal contributions to production. It turns out that the wage of a manager is always at least as high as the wage of its subordinates. On the other hand, the wage of a manager never exceeds...

Testing the Specification of the Mincer Wage Equation I perform the joint estimation of a reduced-form dynamic model of the transition from one grade level to the next, and a Mincer wage equation, using panel data taken from the NLSY. A very high degree of flexibility is achieved by approximating the distributions of idiosyncractic grade transition shocks and wage shocks with high dimensional n...

We find that demand shocks play an important role for business-cycle fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies. The reason is that those shocks give a strong incentive to demand-constrained firms to adjust production and thereby labor input. Furthermore we argue that whether real wage rigidity à la Hall [2005. Employment fluctuations with equilibrium wage stickiness. American Economic Revi...

This short paper attempts to combine the shirking and turnover cost models into a composite model that captures the main features of each. Our main result is that in equilibrium, the elasticity of effort with respect to the wage will equal the elasticity of the average cost of labour with respect to the wage. This is a generalisation of earlier models since this condition simplifies to the fami...

Endogenous Monopsony and the Perverse Effect of the Minimum Wage in Small Firms The minimum wage rate has been introduced in many countries as a means of alleviating the poverty of the working poor. This paper shows, however, that an imperfectly enforced minimum wage rate causes small firms to face an upward-sloping labor supply schedule. Since this turns these firms into endogenous monopsonist...

This paper evaluates the extent of inter-industry and inter-regional wage spillovers across the UK. A large literature exists suggesting that wages elsewhere affect wage determination and levels of satisfaction, but this paper extends the analysis of wage determination to examine the effects of inward investment in the process. Thus far the specific effect of foreign wages on domestic wage dete...

We build a New Keynesian model of the business cycle with sticky prices and real wage rigidities motivated by efficiency wages of the gift exchange variety. Compared to a standard sticky price model, our Fair Wage model provides an explanation for structural unemployment and generates more plausible labor market dynamics — notably accounting for the low correlation between wages and employment....