does marriage really make men more productive this paper presents new descriptive evidence regarding marital pay premiums earned by white males longitudinal data indicate that wages rise after marriage and that cross sectional marriage premiums appear to result from a steepening of the earnings profile data from a company personnelfile that includes information on job grades and supervisor performance ratings reveal large marital status pay differences within a narrow range of occupations managers and professionals and environments a single firm married workers tend to be located in higher paying job grades there are very small pay differentials within grades married men receive higher performance ratings than single men as a result they are much more likely to be promoted controlling for rated performance however eliminates the promotion differential sanders korenman is an assistant professor of economics and public affairs at princeton university and is a faculty associate of the office of population research at princeton university and a research affiliate of the national bureau of economic research nber david neumark is an assistant professor of economics at the university of pennsylvania and a research affiliate of the nber korenman wishes to acknowledge the hewlett foundation and the harvard university center for population studies for financial support the authors are grateful to james medofffor making available an extract from the company personnelfile questions regarding data availability should be directed to professor james

unionisation structures and innovation incentives this paper examines how dierent unionisation structures aect rms innovation incen tives and industry employment we distinguish three modes of unionisation with increasing degree of centralisation 1 decentralisation where wages are determined independently at the rm level 2 coordination where one industry union sets individual wages for all rms and 3 centralisation where an industry union sets a uniform wage rate for all rms while rms investment incentives are largest under centralisation investment in centives are non monotone in the degree of centralisation decentralisation carries higher investment incentives than coordination labour market policy can spur innovation by decentralising unionisation structures or through non discrimination rules

marriage motherhood and wages we explore several problems in drawing causal inferences from cross sectional relationships between marriage motherhood and wages we find that heterogeneity leads to biased estimates of the direct effects of marriage and motherhood on wages i e effects net of experience and tenure first difference estimates reveal no direct effect of marriage or motherhood on women s wages we also find statistical evidence that experience and tenure may be endogenous variables in wage equations instrumental variables estimates suggest that both ordinary least squares cross sectional and first difference estimates understate the direct negative effect of children on wages

wages and employment under trade unionism microeconomic models and macroeconomic applications the first part of this paper is a critical survey of microeconomic research into behavioural models of trade unionism although certain formulations of union objectives and models of wage and employment determination in unionized markets have found favor with economists unfortunately only a little is known about their empirical relevance the second part of this paper deals with the daunting problems of applying these models at the macroeconomic level one such model is estimated with data from sweden s mining and manufacturing sector from 1968 to 1982

on price taking equilibria in club economies with nonanonymous crowding abstract competitive equilibrium in a coalition production economy or a club economy typically does not exist when there is free entry for two reasons first there may be an integer problem as is familiar from club theory with anonymous crowding second optimal groups may have different compositions from the population and then even if there is no integer problem it may be impossible to partition the population into optimal groups i define a notion of approximate equilibrium and show that such an equilibrium always exists in a sufficiently large economy i focus on the optimal size of the economy rather than of clubs

progress in behavioral game theory i s game theory meant to describe actual choices by people and institutions or not it is remarkable how much game theory has been done while largely ignoring this question the seminal book by von neumann and morgenstern the theory of games and economic behavior was clearly about how rational players would play against others they knew were rational in more recent work game theorists are not always explicit about what they aim to describe or advise at one extreme highly mathematical analyses have proposed rationality requirements that people and firms are probably not smart enough to satisfy in everyday decisions at the other extreme adaptive and evolutionary approaches use very simple modelsmostly developed to describe nonhuman animals in which players may not realize they are playing a game at all when game theory does aim to describe behavior it often proceeds with a disturbingly low ratio of careful observation to theorizing this paper describes an approach called behavioral game theory which aims to describe actual behavior is driven by empirical observation mostly experiments and charts a middle course between over rational equilibrium analyses and under rational adaptive analyses the recipe for behavioral game theory i will describe has three steps start with a game or naturally occurring situation in which standard game theory makes a bold prediction based on one or two crucial principles if behavior differs from interested readers familiar with game theory should read crawford 1997 whose approach is more eclectic than mine he concludes p 236 that most strategic behavior can be understood via a synthesis that combines elements from each of the leading theoretical frameworks traditional game theory evolutionary game theory and adaptive learning with a modicum of empirical information about behavior behavioral game theory adds psychological interpretations to this synthesis

tournaments as a worker discipline device c c yang i introduction in the absence of unemployment a worker caught shirking and subsequently fired could obtain a new job at the market wage without difficulty as a result of this and the imperfect monitoring of workers on the job effort shapiro and stiglitz 1984 argued that there must be involuntary unemployment in equilibrium to serve as a worker discipline device making job loss costly so as to discourage shirking 1 in response to shapiro and stiglitz s argument carmichael 1985 suggested that workers could pay employment fees to purchase their jobs and that the competition among workers for jobs would raise such fees until all involuntary unemployment disappeared alternatively there is the so called bonding scheme bonds are posted by workers when initially hired and forfeited if the workers are caught shirking the fear of losing the bonds then substitutes for the threat of becoming unemployed in creating work incentives the competition among workers for jobs would allow firms to charge an amount for bonds until there were no difference between employment and unemployment and so again there would be no involuntary unemployment in a nutshell the introduction of an employment fee or a bonding scheme can eliminate involuntary unemployment making obsolete unemployment as a worker discipline device in the real world however rarely are employment fees or bonding observed why do employment fees bonding or the like not then emerge to arbitrage the difference between employment and unemployment so as to eliminate involuntary unemployment this is a puzzle for shirking models romer 1996 461 2 it has been claimed that contracts with upward sloping age earning profiles the so called implicit bonding can act as perfect substitutes for contracts with explicit employment fees or bonds akerlof and katz 1989 negate this claim and show that the implicit bonding in general does not eliminate the need for involuntary unemployment as a worker discipline device to resolve the bonding issue katz 1986 suggests that future theoretical work is required to analyze the problem in an explicitly contractual setting this article offers an attempt in this direction we study a type of contract which is prevalent in the real world and most importantly can act as a perfect substitute for the employment fee or bonding scheme as far as the elimination of involuntary unemployment is concerned the contract in question is the so called tournament 3 a tournament contract compensates workers on the basis of their relative performance prizes arising from tournaments are fixed in advance and a worker receives the winner s prize not by being good in the absolute sense but by being better than the other workers contracts with the characteristics of tournaments are prevalent in labor markets the salesman who sells the most is given a large bonus the best worker gets promoted to become the company manager etc the incentive effects of tournaments have been analyzed in detail by lazear and rosen 1981 green and stokey 1983 nalebuff and stiglitz 1983 malcomson 1984 and others 4 in contrast to the extensive analysis of the microeconomic incentives of tournaments this article focuses on the macroeconomic implications of tournaments in the vein of shirking models it is shown that all involuntary unemployment will disappear if it is feasible for firms to exploit tournaments to full flexibility this finding pinpoints the power of tournament contracts in resolving involuntary unemployment as a consequence of this result the generation of equilibrium unemployment will require that there be certain impediments to the full exploitation of tournaments we suggest institutional constraints legal rules or social norms as possible candidates for the impediments the rest of this article is organized as follows

wage dispersion and productive efficiency evidence for sweden the swedish record of enormous compression of relative wages under centralized solidarity bargaining followed by substantial decompression of wages after central bargaining broke down supplies observations well suited to empirical evaluation of arguments about the response of productive efficiency to shifts in wage distribution we obtain no results supporting fairness morale and cohesiveness theories implying that wage leveling within workplaces and industries may enhance productivity reduction of interindustry wage differentials evidently did however contribute positively to aggregate output and productivity growth most likely for the structural reasons first emphasized by swedish trade union economists almost a half century ago

the swedish third way an assessment of the performance and validity of the rehn meidner model the swedish third way an assessment of the performance and validity of the rehn meidner model

union egalitarianism as income insurance it is a common observation that unions often try to compress the wage distribution among their members as compared with the productivity distribution a troublesome aspect of standard theories of redistributive unions is the question why high productivity workers choose to enter the union in the first place this paper develops and explores the implications of an alternative insurance rationale for egalitarian wage objectives apart from providing a simple explanation of why heterogeneous union members may agree on egalitarian wage policies it also suggests a more guarded attitude toward the welfare costs of pay compression copyright 1992 by the london school of economics and political science

equal pay for unequal work swedish labor unions pursue an egalitarian wage policy and have successfully squeezed wage differentials the effects in the short run are a rise in the wage of low paid unskilled labor as intended and possibly also of high paid skilled labor but in the long run labor s income share falls as does the wage of skilled labor and possibly even unskilled labor some unskilled labor becomes unemployed in both the short and long run resources are shifted into the export competing sector and away from the import competing sector

unemployment insurance and union wage setting the authors examine alternative systems of financing unemployment insurance benefits in an economy with wage sett ing unions where as in some nordic countries each union runs its o wn unemployment insurance system it is shown that a higher lump sum grant to the union s unemployment insurance fund increases employment whereas higher marginal subsidies have ambiguous effects an unempl oyment insurance tax on wages has no effect on employment whereas an unemployment insurance tax on profits unambiguously increases employ ment the authors also analyze a case where wages are set at the firm level and premiums at the industry level copyright 1988 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

does labour regulation affect technical and allocative efficiency evidence from the banking industry in light of the ongoing restructuring of the european banking industry and the challenging macroeconomic environment banks have increased their efforts to reduce operating costs yet the institutional features that affect banks ability to adjust costs and in particular personnel expenses which comprise a significant part of banks non interest cost structure have not been adequately studied this paper investigates the effect of labour market institutions and regulations on bank performance in 15 european countries over the period 2005 2010 using the fraser index for labour regulation and its disaggregated sub components we propose a novel methodology to measure performance based on the seminal work of kumbhakar and tsionas 2005 which allows the estimation of technical and allocative efficiency and the examination of the effect of labour market regulations in a single stage results indicate the existence of a positive relationship between the liberalisation of eu labour markets and allocative efficiency while the effect on technical efficiency appears to be negative although not statistically significant when looking at the disaggregated components of the labour index we further confirm that different forces are at play

unobservable individual effects marriage and the earnings of young men i introduction married men earn more than unmarried men this fact is unassailable and is robust across data sets and over time two common explanations of the married male wage premium are i the division of labor in a married household which allocates more of the man s time to the market and ii lower cost human capital acquisition for married men both of these stories view marriage as productivity enhancing kenny 1983 provides some evidence that marriage facilitates human capital acquisition however the potential endogeneity of marital status is ignored furthermore the argument that marriage makes it cheaper to accumulate human capital is difficult to reconcile with the fact that individuals who acquire more formal education tend to marry later than those who acquire less bergstrom and schoeni 1992 an alternative explanation for the marriage premium is that marriage signals certain unobservable individual characteristics such as ability honesty loyalty dependability and determination that are valued in both the labor and marriage markets l although i and ii are quite different in terms of their behavioral content they do share a common thread whether marriage per se increases productivity or high productivity men are more likely to be married marital status should not be treated as an exogenous determinant of the wage rate nevertheless in most wage regressions that control for marital status it is assumed to be exogenous resulting in an estimated marriage premium that is biased upward two exceptions are nakosteen and zimmer 1987 and korenman and neumark 1991 although both papers base their empirics on samples of young men they come to very different conclusions regarding the size and source of the marriage premium nakosteen and zimmer find the marriage premium to be insignificantly different from zero and claim that marriage does not make men more productive korenman and neumark kn present evidence that the marriage premium is at least 15 and rises with years married indicating that marriage may be productivity enhancing in this paper we reexamine the empirical relationship between marriage and wages using a sample drawn from the 1971 1976 1978 and 1980 waves of the national longitudinal survey of young men nlsym our data set is an extension of the one used by kn whose empirical work is based on the 1976 1978 and 1980 waves of the nlsym 2 our results may be summarized as follows estimates of the marriage premium derived from fixed effects models which control for unobserved heterogeneity are uniformly smaller than those obtained from random effects models and other cross section approaches that do not specification tests reject the latter and suggest that the individual effects are positively correlated with both marriage and wages conditional on labor market experience job tenure and year effects time spent in marriage has no significant effect on wages this stands as evidence against any dynamic productivity enhancing effect of marriage we conclude that whatever the source the marriage premium is a pure intercept shift and no more than 5 to 7 further support for this conclusion comes from the relationship between prospective marriage and wages using our longer panel we construct a to be married variable which identifies men who marry sometime during the sample period men who are not married in 1971 but who will be earn at least as much as those who are already married finally an interesting related result is the robust and significant effect of children on wages conditional on marital status and years married the presence of children raises wages about 5 regardless of the estimator employed we interpret the effects of marriage and children on wages similarly as structural breaks in the wage generating process involving adjustments in market work and homework among other things

earnings differentiation in the tourism industry gender human capital and socio demographic effects abstract this paper draws attention to a somewhat neglected field within tourism research namely the production side of tourism set within a human capital framework the purpose of the study is to examine if and how the variables education work experience and the socio demographic variables parenthood and marriage affect norwegian tourism employees annual wages in the 1994 2002 period furthermore the study specifically examines how the variables gender and time affect these wages among several findings four are of major importance 1 male tourism employees receive about 20 higher wages annually than their female counterparts ceteris paribus 2 there is a concave i e inverted u relationship between work experience and annual wages for both female and male employees but this pattern is much less distinct for females 3 both parenthood and marriage affect wages but their effects differ between male and female employees 4 all tourism employees experience a positive annual wage development in the period studied

markets for risk and openness to trade how are they related if protectionist trade policies aim to insure domestic industries against swings in world market prices the development of financial markets could lead to trade liberalization likewise trade lib

innovation inequality and intellectual property rights we examine whether income inequality explains innovation across countries the mechanism could be twofold first a large middle class could have an impact on institutions including intellectual property rights iprs which could in turn affect innovation second evidence from us economic history suggests direct linkages between middle class share and innovation via supply and demand effects using ive to address endogeneity we find that middle class share explains patterns of resident patenting while non resident patenting is driven more by exogenous factors and global integration our results illustrate an additional channel through which income inequality can impact long run growth

the marriage earnings premium as a distributed fixed effect wage equations using cross sectional data typically find an earnings premium in excess of 10 percent for married men one leading hypothesis for the premium is that marriage facilitates specialization that enables married men to become more productive than single men another is that the premium is attributable to an unobserved fixed effect married men possessing qualities that are valued in the labor market as well as the marriage market this paper suggests that the premium is attributable to an unobserved timedistributed fixed effect that emerges and grows with the approach of marriage and continues to grow for some years after marriage a similar distributed fixed effect is found in the case of women but it is smaller and declines after a few years of marriage the results appear to cast doubt on the specialization hypothesis

labour market institutions and household consumption insurance within oecd countries this paper tests empirically whether the effect of idiosyncratic income shocks on aggregate consumption depends on institutional features of national labour markets the results show that in a sample of 15 oecd countries institutional heterogeneity is a significant determinant of the response of household consumption to country specific income shocks this is consistent with the idea that institutionally provided social insurance may help increase income stability when people differ in their ability to access financial markets and smooth consumption fluctuations

do marital status and computer usage really change the wage structure this analysis uses several identification strategies and data sources to control for individual ability and determine the causal effect of marital status and computer usage on wages although data from the cps nlsy and a data set of identical twins show that there are large cross sectional effects of these variables new econometric specifications are applied to these data which indicate that marital status and computer usage are not important causal determinants of earnings even after adjustments are made for measurement error and within twin differences in ability

labour market regulation industrial relations and technological regimes a tale of comparative advantage in this paper we present comparative evidence from oecd countries concerning the impact of labour market institutions and regulations on technological specialization the interplay between the degree of labour market flexibility the system of industrial relations and the knowledge base of different industries determines the viability of different human resource strategies thereby shaping the patterns of comparative advantage our empirical results show that countries with coordinated industrial relations systems and strict employment protection tend to specialize in industries with a cumulative knowledge base we argue that two mechanisms explain these patterns the larger the scope for resorting to internal labour markets the lower the adjustment costs imposed by labour market regulation furthermore employment protection and coordinated industrial relations regimes by aligning workers and firms bjectives encourage firm sponsored training as well as the accumulation of firm specific competencies allowing firms to fully exploit the potential of the internal labour market copyright 2002 oxford university press

the consequences of de regulation on employment duration and efficiency an experimental study i introduction when little is known about the future market conditions offering an employment contract that regulates working conditions for many periods can be dangerous if market wages drastically decline one may hire labor more cheaply furthermore an employee may turn out less reliable than expected such risks are by no means farfetched rather they relate to crucial aspects of long term employment 1 so why is long term employment still predominant and short term employment for example in the form of rented labor rare albeit increasing see alewell et al 2007 an explanation might be the increasing institutional flexibility regarding wage adjustments institutional downward flexibility is usually not legally codified but often a consequence of court rulings and thereby based on social norms 2 see for instance bewley 1995 in our paper we want to investigate whether more flexibility in wage adjustment from none to full flexibility increases the duration of accepted employment contracts our first hypothesis hypothesis a which we wish to test experimentally is that contract duration depends on contract flexibility one obvious argument for long term employment is that offering a short term contract reveals distrust in the newly hired worker and encourages shirking but what is wrong with long term employment resulting from both partners employer and employee repeatedly and mutually opting for rematching another reason for long term employment could be that in the long run it allows the interacting parties more easily to overcome efficiency losses due to opportunistic behavior in our experimental scenario regulations prevent efficient employment contracts when workers react opportunistically but do long term employees care more for efficiency and therefore invest more than optimal efforts deregulation 3 has been the major policy recommendation for nearly all developed market economies for the most part the effects of de regulation are predicted by rational choice analyses of labor markets an interesting exception that takes into account the empirical evidence from behavioral labor economics fehr gotte and zehnder 2009 is the analysis of agell 1999 in whose tradition we want to provide a behaviorally informed discussion of de regulation rather than doing this by field data our empirical approach is an experimental one our earlier experimental findings berninghaus bleich and giath 2008 question the idea that labor market efficiency is higher in deregulated markets to determine more systematically whether the usual intuition that wage rigidities undermine efficiency is correct or whether our earlier results are more reliable we analyze more thoroughly the interdependency of wage flexibility and employment duration our second hypothesis claims that long term contracts are substituted by renewable contracts when contracts become more inflexible hypothesis b unlike in our previous study where we varied only the flexibility of fixed wages in this study piece rates may also be adapted periodically in the experiment of brown falk and fehr 2004 where work contracts last for only one period long term relationships between employers and employees can only be established if the employer offers a new contract to the same employee in each period we too allow for voluntary renewal of contracts at the end of each period but also the possibility of offering contracts which extend for more than one period our study is more systematic than previous ones because we do not just compare less with more labor flexibility but distinguish five flexibility treatments which can be at least partially ordered from less to more flexibility for any kind of monotonicity hypothesis this can be viewed as a real stress test note that already the one off interaction of our basic labor market scenario allows for reciprocity 4 since employees choose effort after accepting a more or less favorable employment contract

minimum wages and the incentives for skill formation we show that minimum wages may have beneficial effects on human capital allocation in a situation when the marginal product of skilled labor is shared between firm and worker according to bargaining strength firms prefer more productive workers to less p

public employment and labour market performance public employment does it increase unemployment we explore the consequences of public employment for labour market performance theory suggests that public employment may not only crowd out private employment but also increase overall unemployment if by offering attractive working conditions it draws additional individuals into the labour force empirical evidence from a sample of oecd countries in the 1960 2000 period suggests that on average creation of 100 public jobs may have eliminated about 150 private sector jobs slightly decreased labour market participation and increased by about 33 the number of unemployed workers theoretical considerations and empirical evidence however suggest that the crowding out effect of public jobs on private jobs is only significant in countries where public production is highly substitutable to private activities and the public sector offers more attractive wages and or other benefits than the private labour market

little innovation many jobs an econometric analysis of the italian labour productivity crisis during the past twenty years italy has realized changes in labour legislation leading to a decentralization of wage bargaining and increased flexibility in labour relations both these factors have helped to curb wage growth and to enhance employment growth but have also led to a crisis in italian labour productivity growth our estimates among 3 000 firms show that firms with high shares of flexible workers a high labour turnover and lower costs of labour relative to capital experienced significantly lower rates of labour productivity growth our findings raise doubts about the mainstream call for flexibilisation of european labour markets we argue hat the italian shift towards a low productive and labour intensive growth path is problematic gainst the background of an ageing population

the fall in men s return to marriage declining productivity effects or changing selection historically one of the most robust findings from human capital wage equations has been that married men earn more than men who never marry however the earnings premium paid to u s married compared with never married men declined by more than 40 percent during the 1980s data from the national longitudinal surveys young men and youth cohorts are used to explore two competing explanations for this decline changes in the selection of high wage men into marriage and changes in the productivity effects of marriage due to declining specialization within households the results suggest that the drop in the marriage wage premium was due largely to a decline in the productivity effects associated with marriage instrumental variables estimation suggests that these declining productivity effects can be explained by a reduction in the average degree of specialization across households coupled with an increase in the wage penalty associated with wives labor market hours excerpt

literacy sharing assortative mating or what labour market advantages and proximate illiteracy revisited abstract this paper explores the relationship between household literacy and the labour market outcomes of illiterate household members which basu narayan and ravallion 2002 report using household income and expenditure data from bangladesh bnr attribute a considerable wage premium for proximate illiterate women in off farm employment to labour productivity gains from intra household literacy sharing this wage premium also suggests that women may be more efficient recipients of literacy externalities than men we propose that any such relationship might not be due to higher labour productivity but may have other explanations such as systematically different and unobserved attributes of illiterate females married into literate households we also pay attention to the negative selection of illiterate females into non farm wage employment which contrary to received wisdom suggests that household literacy may not be unambiguously progressive for females we propose that the widely reported finding that

decentralization in replicated club economies with multiple private goods abstract we show that exhaustion of blocking opportunities is a sufficient condition such that every allocation in the core of a replicated club economy can be decentralized as a competitive equilibrium and that a related condition efficient scale is necessary and under an assumption on endowments sufficient such that competitive equilibrium exists and the core is nonempty these results do not require the euclidean structure and monotonicity assumed in lindahl equilibrium do not require convexity of preferences or costs and do not require the strong assumption that private goods are essential journal of economic literature classification numbers d46 d50 d61 h40

labour market policy and unemployment the paper discusses three aspects of the system for unemployment support first active labour market programmes as a means of re allocating labour from high unemployment to low unemployment sectors are analysed and it is concluded that wage raising accommodation effects may be a serious problem second the possibility of strengthening incentives for wage moderation by differentiating employee and or employer contributions to unemployment insurance are discussed third the question is raised whether there may exist other institutional set ups for providing unemployment support that are more efficient in terms of returning the unemployed to work than government run systems

the rise in unemployment a multi country study one of the most remarkable features of recent economic history has been the remorseless rise in unemployment throughout the industrialized countries however while the trend to higher unemployment is universal the experience of individual countries also differs widely the increase is especially marked within the european community where unemployment rates rival those reached in the interwar years by contrast in the scandinavian countries and japan unemployment is lower and has risen very much less experience in the united states lies somewhere between these extremes and in the last few years unemployment there has fallen sharply

minimum wage unemployment and growth abstract this paper shows that in an overlapping generations model with endogenous growth minimum wage legislation does not necessarily has negative consequences on economic performance such legislation can have positive effects on growth by inducing more human capital accumulation more precisely a low demand for unskilled labor induced by a minimum wage may create an incentive for workers to accumulate human capital moreover it is possible that a decrease in the minimum wage lowers the welfare of each agent in the economy

union density and varieties of coverage the anatomy of union wage effects in germany collective bargaining in germany takes place at either industry or firm level and bargaining coverage is much higher than union density the share of a firm s employees covered can vary between 0 and 100 suggesting that researchers should distinguish union density coverage at the firm level and coverage at the individual level using linked employer employee data the authors estimate ols and quantile regressions of wages on these dimensions of union influence they find that a higher share of employees in a firm covered by industrywide or firm specific contracts is associated with higher wages but find no clear cut effect on wage dispersion yet holding coverage at the firm level constant individual coverage is associated with lower wages and less wage dispersion higher union density reinforces the effects of coverage but for employees in firms without coverage density s effect is negative and thus compresses the wage distribution in firms without coverage

the labour market and economic risk friend or foe this paper examines the twofold role of the labour market in household economic risk management as a source of household consumption risk and as an instrument for insuring consumption against contingencies it outlines a framework for analysing this twofold role of the labour market and uses data from the british household panel survey 1991 1996 to explore this empirically it identifies the relative importance of the labour market and other factors in producing changes in the financial situation of individuals it also implements full insurance tests of whether unemployment and other external shocks to the household are correlated with consumption growth it concludes that labour market factors are a dominant source of change in individuals financial situation with a predominantly positive effect on the financial situation of the better off and a predominantly negative impact on the financial situation of the less well off it also finds that households are unable to fully insure their consumpti

on the benefits from rigid labour markets norms market failures and social insurance the common view that far reaching labour market deregulation is the only remedy for high european unemployment is too simplistic first the evidence suggests that deeply rooted social customs are

is flexible labour good for innovation evidence from firm level data whether the use of flexible workers is damaging to innovation or not depends on the dominant innovation regime in a sector in sectors with a routinised innovation regime high shares of low paid temporary workers have a negative impact on the probability that firms invest in r d in sectors that tend towards a garage business regime however flexibility has no impact the two innovation regimes differ in the nature of their knowledge base reliance on generally available knowledge or dependence on a firm s historically accumulated knowledge base innovation in the latter regime benefits from longer job durations our results are consistent with findings in macro level studies that coordinated market economies with rigid labour markets have higher labour productivity gains than liberalised market economies

unemployment compensation and high european unemployment a reassessment with new benefit indicators generous unemployment benefits lie at the heart of the conventional explanation for persistent high unemployment the effects of benefit generosity on work incentives are more ambiguous in a broader behavioural framework in which workers get substantial disutility from unemployment given income and know that unemployment has scarring effects in the future the micro evidence suggests modest effects of changes in generosity but there are reasons to doubt that the impacts on national unemployment rates are consequential the empirical case for the orthodox prediction comes from cross country regressions on the oecd s gross replacement rate grr but the published evidence is mixed and we find little support in the pattern of annual changes in the grr and the unemployment rate for oecd countries over the last three decades we take advantage of new and much improved net replacement indicators from the oecd which show little correlation with either the grrs or with unemployment and employment rates we conclude that the available evidence does not offer compelling support for the conventional view

good and bad institutions is the debate over cross country firm level evidence from the textile industry using firm level data from nine developing countries we demonstrate that certain institutions like restrictive labour market regulations that are considered bad for economic growth might be beneficial for production efficiency whereas good business environment which is considered beneficial for economic growth might have an adverse impact on production efficiency we argue that our results suggest that there might be significant difference in the macro and micro impacts of institutional quality such that the classification of institutions into good and bad might be premature

wage settlements and wage setting results from a multi level model which dimensions of wage setting differ across establishments applying collective contracts and uncovered establishments the empirical analysis reported here utilizes german linked employer employee data for the years 1990 1995 and 2001 and is restricted to workers without supervisory functions in larger manufacturing firms results show that the expected wage of an average worker is higher in firms applying collective contracts while returns to human capital and the gender wage gap are reduced moreover during the 1990s these effects became stronger

when labour market rigidities are useful for innovation evidence from german iab firm level data abstract supply side economists made numerous pleas for removing labour market rigidities through structural reforms from a schumpeterian viewpoint however one can argue that labour market rigidities create useful incentives for innovation our estimates on german panel data 2007 2015 support the schumpeterian view using the taxonomy of industries by peneder 2010 we find that evidence of the schumpeterian view is particularly strong in r d intensive manufacturing industries as well as in service industries with high degrees of cumulativeness of knowledge evidence of the schumpeterian view is weaker in low technology industries and in start ups when firms rely more on generally available knowledge rather than on firm specific and tacit knowledge accumulated in the past

wage structure as implicit insurance on human capital in developed versus underdeveloped countries abstract this paper explores the role of wage structure as implicit insurance on human capital it illustrates how smaller wage differentials in the developed world can be welfare enhancing by acting as implicit insurance while larger wage differentials in underdeveloped countries make investments in human capital riskier in other words with smaller wage differentials the students in a developed country are insured against poor educational outcomes through the existence of well paid alternative employments which are not present in the economy of a less developed country this result arises as multiple equilibria in a general equilibrium model when there are no insurance markets for human capital

the accumulation of dis advantage the intersection of gender and race in the long term wage effect of marriage a sizable literature examines whether and why marriage affects men s and women s wages this study advances current research in two ways first whereas most prior studies treat the effect of marri

sources of bias in women s wage equations results using sibling data we use data on sisters to jointly address heterogeneity bias and endogeneity bias in estimates of wage equations for women this analysis yields evidence of biases in ols estimates of wage equations for white and black women some of which are detected only when the two sources of bias are addressed simultaneously for both white and black women there is evidence of upward bias in the estimated returns to schooling bias corrected estimates of the effect of marriage on wages for white women suggest a positive marriage premium we also use the sibling data to identify our models and test a number of other commonly used identifying assumptions as overidentifying restrictions