Qualifications, Discrimination, or Assimilation? An Extended Framework for Analysing Immigrant Wage Gaps In this paper, we analyze immigrant wage gaps and propose an extension of the traditional wage decomposition technique, which is a synthesis from two strains of literature on ethnic/immigrant wage differences, namely the ‘assimilation literature’ and the ‘discrimination literature’. We estim...

The Gender Wage Gap in Four Countries In a series of studies written during the 1980s Bob Gregory and his co-authors compared the gender wage gap in Australia with that found in other countries. They found it was not the difference in human capital endowments that explained different gender wage gaps but rather the rewards for these endowments. They concluded that country-specific factors, espe...

Wage theft, or nonpayment of wages to which workers are legally entitled, is a major contributor to low income, which in turn has adverse health effects. We describe a participatory research study of wage theft among immigrant Chinatown restaurant workers. We conducted surveys of 433 workers, and developed and used a health department observational tool in 106 restaurants. Close to 60% of worke...

This paper investigates when trade could cause the selection effect. Since the increased average real wage induced by trade triggers the selection effect in Melitz (2003), the main issue is the labor market conditions under which trade raises the average real wage. To identify the labor market conditions for the selection effect, this paper employs worker heterogeneity with respect to abilities...

Matched employer-employee data exhibits both wage and productivity dispersion across firms and suggest that a linear relationship holds between the average wage paid and a firm productivity. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that these facts can be explained by a search and matching model when firms are heterogenous with respect to productivity, are composed of many workers, and face ...

Angle (2006) shows that the macro model of the Inequality Process provides a parsimonious fit to the U.S. wage income distribution conditioned on education, 1961-2001. Such a model should also account for all time-series of scalar statistics of annual wage income. The present paper examines one such time-series, the relative frequency of large wage incomes 1961-2003. Figure 1 shows an aspect of...

This paper discusses the endeavours of policy makers to come to some degree of wage coordination among EU countries, aiming at aligning nominal wage growth with labour productivity growth at the national levels. In this context, we analyse the nominal wage and productivity developments in Germany, the European Union’s periphery countries Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain along with the US fo...

In 1979 there were 3.7 million state government employees (SGE’s) in the United States, with a monthly payroll of $3.9 billion. This state government employment represented a sizable increase from the 1970 level of 2.8 million workers.’ Recent work by Smith [1977] provides evidence of a wage differential between SGE’s and private sector workers. She finds that (male) wage rates are about 8% hig...

This paper presents evidence on the extent of wage mobility both while working for the same firm and when moving to a new firm. We find that mean wage growth between jobs is large in comparison to wage growth while working for the same employer, especially for less educated workers who experience low mean wage growth between jobs but even lower wage growth while working for the same employer. T...

Suppose two groups of workers separated on the basis of a variable that should be a priori non in ‡uential on wage, such as race or gender. Suppose two groups of workers separated on the basis of a variable that should be a priori non in ‡uential on wage, such as race or gender. The wage of these workers will depend upon many factors. Some of these factors may constitute objective explanations ...