price flexibility in developing countries evidence and implications using data for a sample of 50 developing countries the empirical investigation evaluates determinants and implications of asymmetric price flexibility price inflation is characterized by high flexibility to adjust towards full equilibrium further price inflation accelerates flexibly with unanticipated demand growth in both the upward and downward directions in most of the countries under investigation asymmetry indicates higher upward flexibility compared to downward flexibility in many countries aggregate uncertainty determines the degree of asymmetry such that price flexibility is higher with respect to expansionary demand shocks compared to contractionary shocks the higher the variability of aggregate demand across countries in contrast higher trend price inflation increases downward price flexibility across countries output variability decreases with both upward and downward price flexibility in the face of aggregate demand shocks a the views expressed in this article are those of the a

nonmonetary effects of the financial crisis in propagation of the great depression this paper examines the effects of the financial crisis of the 1930s onthe path of aggregate output during that period our approach is complementary to that of friedman and schwartz who emphasized the monetary impact of the bank failures we focus on non monetary primarily credit related aspects of the financial sector output link and consider the problems of debtors as well as those of the banking system we argue that the financial disruptions of 1930 33 reduced the efficiency of the credit allocation process and that the resulting higher cost and reduced availability of credit acted to depress aggregate demand evidence suggests that effects of this type can help explain the unusual length and depth of the great depression this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

occupational self selection a human capital approach to sex differences in occupational structure a rich and diverse literature exists concerning the distribution of labor incomes one approach namely that of human capital concentrates on lifetime accumulation paths of earnings capacity units human capital individual variations in human capital imply differences in earnings power thereby yielding strong implications concerning earnings distribution within a population despite its explanatory power the human capital model has been widely criticized one criticism centers on its inability to obtain inferences concerning occupational distribution the purpose of this paper is to alleviate at least some such criticism by applying the hedonic price approach so as to embed occupational choice into the human capital framework the significance is that neoclassical economic theory can be used to obtain implications concerning the determinants of occupational structure excerpt

theoretical approaches to monetary disinflation abstract during the 1980s many countries adopted tight monetary policies to reduce high inflation rates which were the legacy of the 1970s as inflation threatens to rise at the beginning of this decade this paper provides a survey of the 1980s literature which sought to provide theoretical understandings of how monetary disinflation is achieved four models are presented monetarist neo keynesian new classical and post keynesian each model s explanation of the recession which accompanies the monetary disinflation is outlined as well as possible policy measures to reduce the extent of the recession and to hasten the return to full employment

social security in panama a multiperiod analysis of income distribution abstract a unique multiperiod data set is used to look at the income distribution effects of the retirement portion of the social security system of panama while it is clear that the system is an important source of income for workers it is argued that its true redistributive importance is greatly exaggerated using a multiperiod view it is found that previously high wage and urban workers are disproportionately represented among current recipients it is also argued that social security has substantially reduced the work effort of these workers hence the appropriateness of the present social security system is questioned on both equity and efficiency grounds

the structure of the female male wage differential is it who you are what you do or where you work the efficacy of policies to narrow the malelfemale wage differential depends partly on the size of the portion s of the gap targeted previous research finds no between sex wage gap within occupations within employer job cell this is the first study to disentangle segregation by occupation from that based on employer or on job cell in five industries controlling for other forms of segregation occupational segregation produces a gap of 11 percent manufacturing to 26 percent services the wage gaps from establishment and job cell segregation are about 6 percent each since comparable worth acts on the occupation and job cell components it has a potentially large impact

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

experience tenure and wage growth of young black and white men this paper studies the source of differences in wage growth between young black and white workers focusing on terminal high school graduates from the national longitudinal survey of youth we estimate the returns to on the job tenure and general labor market experience using ordinary least squares altonji and shakotko and topel estimators results from all three estimators indicate that returns to general experience for black workers trail those for white workers but that black workers earn equal if not higher returns to tenure than do white workers

job change patterns and the wages of young men this study uses data from the national longitudinal survey of youth to distinguish empirically between mover stayer search good and experience good models of job mobility we estimate wage models in which the pattern of overall job mobility affects both the level and tenure slope of the log wage path after controlling for the correlation between mobility patterns and time constant person and job specific unobservables we find that workers who undergo persistent mobility have lower log wage paths than less mobile workers this finding is consistent with models in which job mobility is driven by time varying unobservables such as experience good models where changes in perceived match quality cause turnover

effects of family background on earnings and returns to schooling evidence from brazil we investigate whether omitted family background variables are responsible for high returns to schooling estimated in brazil returns to schooling fall by about one third when parental schooling is added to wage equations surprisingly the schooling of fathers in law has larger effects on wages than the schooling of fathers on the basis of a model of assortative mating we interpret this as evidence that parental characteristics represent unobservable worker attributes rather than nepotism in the labor market we conclude that the family background bias in returns to schooling is modest and need not imply returns to family connections

a search interpretation of male female wage differentials a general equilibrium search framework is used to examine the role of gender differences in labor market behavior patterns e g quit rates for personal reasons in determining gender wage differentials for samples of high school and college graduates from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy these behavioral patterns are found to be significantly different across the sexes and account for 20 30 of the wage differentials in particular they play a key role in explaining the male female wage differential that remains after controlling for the gender composition across occupations

nominal and real wage cyclicality during the interwar period although there have been numerous attempts to study the cyclicality of real wages in the u s no consensus has formed as to the implications of the various findings for business cycle theory this paper will demonstrate that separating the real wage into its nominal and price level components can shed new light on the interwar u s labor market more specifically we will show that an evolution from a relatively laissez faire labor market during the 1920s to a more highly regulated labor market during the 1930s may have resulted in a more countercyclical real wage rate if we could be certain that equilibrium business cycle models provided the correct specification of the labor market then interpretation of real wage cyclicality would be relatively straightforward during periods dominated by labor demand shocks real wages would move procyclically and during periods dominated by labor supply shocks real wages would move countercyclically in a disequilibrium model context however interpretation of real wage cyclicality is much more problematic if nominal wages are sticky then unanticipated price level changes can induce countercyclical real wage movements that mimic the real wage movements generated by shifts in the supply of labor perhaps the most famous and controversial example occurred during the first three years of the great depression when a massive decline in hours worked and production was associated with a sharp increase in the aggregate real wage rate see figure 1 even greater complexity results from governmental attempts to influence the aggregate nominal wage policies that attempt to artificially change the nominal wage rate can result in either procyclical or countercyclical real wages depending on whether the direct impact of changes in the price of labor on the quantity of labor demanded outweighs the impact of wage changes on aggregate demand and output separating the aggregate real wage rate into its nominal and price level components will allow us to discriminate between these two hypotheses if labor markets are correctly characterized by equilibrium models then the price level and real wage are determined independently and separating the real wage into its nominal and price

are those paid more really more productive the case of experience this study uses computerized personnel microdata on the white male managerial and professional employees at a major u s corporation to address the following question can the additional earnings which are associated with more labor market experience at a point in time really be explained by higher productivity at the same point in time our answer to this question based on both cross sectional and longitudinal information is that performance plays a substantially smaller role in explaining cross sectional experience earnings differentials and earnings growth than is claimed by those who have adopted the human capital explanation of the experience earnings profile this response depends critically on our assumption that the performance ratings which supervisors give to their white male managerial and professional subordinates adequately reflect the subordinates relative productivity in the year of assessment we present a great deal of evidence which strongly supports this assumption

the accumulation of human capital during marriage by males married males have significantly higher wage rates than never married widowed or divorced males even when differences in educational attainment experience race and so on are controlled for evidence presented in this paper suggests that most of the unexplained wage differential associated with marital status in earnings regressions results from males accumulating human capital more rapidly when they are married than when those same males are not married the hypothesis that married males earn more than unmarried males because marriage facilitates the financing of human capital accumulation is supported by this and other evidence

the differential effects of output shocks on unemployment rates by race and gender 1 introduction the issues of unemployment and output are central to many macroeconomic policy debates a major source of disagreement among policymakers deals with the maximum sustainable level of output growth that is consistent with the absence of inflation when the economy s rate of output growth exceeds the maximum sustainable rate there will be upward pressure on the economy s overall price level traditional macroeconomic theory emphasizes the role that tight labor markets play in this inflationary pressure the commonly held belief is that in a tight labor market firms must bid workers away from other firms if they wish to expand the size of their workforce hence labor costs in the economy will tend to rise since labor is a major input in the production of virtually all goods and services an increase in labor costs without an accompanying increase in productivity will tend to increase the economy s overall price level conversely when the economy contracts labor costs in the economy will tend to fall inducing a downward movement in the economy s overall price level the labor market is therefore linked to changes in economic activity and to changes in the economy s price level a common feature in many macroeconomic models is the connection between departures from the equilibrium rate of unemployment i e the natural or normal rate and the business cycle these macroeconomic models suggest that unanticipated departures from a steady state in the output market should be related to departures of the actual unemployment rate from the normal rate however the economy s aggregate unemployment rate is actually a weighted average of the unemployment rates of various demographic groups the rate of each demographic group is influenced by that group s flows into and out of unemployment since many of the factors that determine these flows have been found to differ by demographic group it is expected that a given aggregate output shock may have differential effects on the unemployment rates of various groups this article focuses on how unanticipated changes in real output affect the unemployment rate of different demographic groups we examine the time series behavior of black male white male black female and white female monthly unemployment rates over the january 1972august 1999 period specifically we estimate a vector autoregression var and then conduct simulations in the form of impulse responses to determine the extent to which each of these unemployment rates is affected by an aggregate output shock i e an unanticipated change in aggregate output we compare and contrast the magnitude and the persistence of these responses across the groups because the traditional impulse response function generated from a var is sensitive to how the researcher chooses to order the variables with different orderings often giving vastly different results we employ the recently developed generalized impulse response function koop pesaran and potter 1996 pesaran and shin 1998 this technique allows researchers to examine impulse responses that are robust to changes in ordering in the following sections we highlight the major literature that this article builds upon and then we discuss the basics behind the nature of the relationship between the unemployment rate and output a discussion of the data the methodology and the results follows the article closes with concluding remarks and policy implications 2 related literature a number of studies have examined racial differences in unemployment rates and in factors that may affect unemployment rates using data on displaced workers fairlie and kletzer 1998 examine racial differences in job displacement over the years 1984 1992 and find that black males experienced greater rates of job displacement and lower rates of reemployment than white males petterson 1998 uses data from the national longitudinal survey of youth for the 19791986 period to examine the reservation wages of black males compared with those of white males and contrary to earlier research argues that these differences do not explain much if any of the racial employment gap

gender differences in wages and job turnover among continuously employed workers the purpose of this paper is to determine whether a significant number of u s women work continuously during their early careers which women are likely to do so and how these women compare to men in terms of their interfirm mobility and earnings the data are from the young men and young women cohorts of the national longitudinal surveys of labor market experience nls continuous employment is by no means the norm among young women but it appears to be a growing trend in comparing starting wages of men and women we find that the wage gap is less pronounced among continuously employed workers than among the full sample in almost every race cohort schooling group and the gap is narrowing far more rapidly among the continuously employed excerpt

the wage effects of voluntary labor mobility with and without intervening unemployment this study investigates how an unemployment spell between jobs affects a job changer s new wages one hypothesis holds that the search and mobility costs associated with unemployment between jobs are compensated for by increased wage gains resulting from more intensive job search opposing hypotheses are that unemployed job changers are at a disadvantage because they have fewer job contacts than job changers who move directly from one job to another or because they are unable to gain new skills or develop good work habits while unemployed the results of this analysis of 1979 81 data from the national longitudinal survey of young men support the first hypothesis an unemployment spell between jobs is associated with wage gains higher than those obtained when the job change was made with no intervening unemployment

social security and extreme poverty in latin america abstract this article argues that although social security has had a significant impact in preventing a considerable number of people from falling below the extreme poverty level in latin america it has not played an important role in reducing current extreme poverty in the region the analysis is done focusing on three social security objectives protection of the needy affected by social risks progressive income redistribution and promotion of savings investment to reduce inflation and enhance development the author discusses a series of recommendations for achievement of the three cited objectives in order to diminish critical poverty in the future

household specialization and the male marriage wage premium empirical research has consistently shown that married men have substantially higher wages on average than otherwise similar unmarried men one commonly cited hypothesis to explain this pattern is that marriage allows one spouse to specialize in market production and the other to specialize in home production enabling the former usually the husband to acquire more market specific human capital and ultimately earn higher wages the authors test this hypothesis using panel data from the national survey of families and households the data reveal that married men spent virtually the same amount of time on home production as did single men albeit on different types of housework estimates from a fixed effects wage equation indicate that the male marriage wage premium is not substantially affected by controls for home production activities household specialization the authors conclude does not appear to have been responsible for the marriage premium in this sample

early career work experience and gender wage differentials we estimate a wage model that includes an array of variables measuring the fraction of time worked during each year of the career this array fully characterizes past employment experience regardless of how sporadic it has been our model yields substantially higher estimated returns to experience and lower returns to tenure than do models that measure experience cumulatively and use the standard quadratic functional form we find that the data reject the standard model but fail to reject our model furthermore we find that 12 of the male female wage gap is due to differences in the timing of work experience

the gender gap in early career wage growth in the uk the gender pay gap on entry to the labour market is approximately zero but ten years after labour market entry there is a gender wage gap of almost 25 log points this article explores the reason for this gender gap in early career wage growth considering three main hypotheses human capital job shopping and psychological theories human capital factors can explain about 11 log points job shopping about 1 5 log points and the psychological theories up to 4 5 log points depending on the specification but a substantial unexplained gap remains women who have continuous full time employment have had no children and express no desire to have them earn about 8 log points less than equivalent men after 10 years in the labour market

causes and consequences of layoffs using probit analysis this article finds that differential treatment accounts for a substantial portion of the higher layoff rates of blacks in comparison to whites however women are found to be considerably less prone to layoffs than men with similar characteristics among those who obtained subsequent employment taking into account the possible selectivity bias in such a subsample white males are hurt more by layoffs than black males in terms of both short term and long term earnings growth women s earnings are not necessarily affected by layoff at all however whites and males are found to be more likely to be reemployed than blacks and females respectively

sex discrimination and competition in product and labour markets theoritical explanations for wage discrimination collapse in the long run because competition should drive discriminations firms out of the market in product markets with imperfect competition em

female leadership and gender equity evidence from plant closure abstract we use unique worker plant matched panel data to measure differences in wage changes experienced by workers displaced from closing plants we observe larger losses among women than men comparing workers who move from the same closing plant to the same new firm however we find a significantly smaller gap in hiring firms with female leadership the results are strongest among women who are displaced from male led plants and from less competitive industries our results suggest an important externality to having women in leadership positions they cultivate more female friendly cultures inside their firms

the returns to mobility and job search by gender using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth the authors estimate the returns to job search mobility and the interaction of search and mobility for young men and women they find st

the economic consequences of labor mobility unlike most previous research on the relative changes in earnings of job stayers and job changers this study examines the variance in earnings changes rather than simply average changes men and women rather than only men and the five year period following job change rather than only the first year or two the author finds great variability in earnings changes both within and across race and gender groups notably men gained more from quits and except in the case of low wage workers lost less from layoffs than women also men suffered a much smaller penalty than women for repeated job changes for all groups the percentage difference between earnings before and after leaving a job generally persisted for several years

worker effort decisions and efficient gender specific wage tenure profiles i introduction during the past thirty years women have increased their labor force participation female labor market intermittency has decreased and women s total labor market experience and years of tenure with the current employer have increased what these trends imply about the evolution of the gender gap in wages depends in part on gender differences in returns to tenure it is therefore surprising that economists have all but ignored the empirical finding that women have higher returns to tenure than do men over a significant portion of their working lives one reason why this finding has been ignored or treated as an anomaly may be the lack of theoretical constructs which predict an inverse gender gap in returns to tenure several labor market models predict that women should have lower returns to tenure than men human capital theory offers the most frequently cited explanation of flatter earnings profiles for female workers according to human capital theory gains from specialization and exchange lead to one household member specializing in home production and the other in market work since only women bear children historically the outcome of the exchange has been that women have specialized in home production indeed all surveys of time use indicate that women spend on average two to three times as long on housework as men as a consequence of this allocation women anticipate intermittent labor force participation and fewer years overall in the labor force than men this pattern too is borne out in national surveys which invariably find shorter average tenure and fewer total years of labor market experience for women than for men women typically have shorter completed job spells as well hall 1982 table 5 presents evidence that the gender gap in completed job duration is quite large he estimates that 63 8 percent of men but only 49 6 percent of women hold jobs with eventual tenure of at least five years with 37 3 and 15 1 percent of men and women respectively holding jobs with eventual tenure of at least twenty years because of the greater intermittency and shorter anticipated work history for women than men women will find it optimal to acquire less human capital than men 1 lesser quantities of general human capital tends to flatten both the observed earnings experience profile and the observed earnings tenure profile two factors contribute to this pattern first skills deteriorate during periods out of the labor market as in mincer and polachek 1974 which flattens the earnings experience profile for women relative to men second women anticipating discontinuous work histories select into occupations with flatter earnings profiles to minimize the penalty to labor force withdrawals as in polachek 1981 the effects of firm specific human capital on gender differences in wage tenure profiles vary across models for example kuhn 1993 constructs an elegant game theoretic model of gender differences in training and wages if women have a higher exogenous exit rate than men in equilibrium they will be placed in jobs with lower levels of firm specific training with a positive relation between training and productivity and a common share rate of the costs and benefits of specific training for men and women the wage tenure profiles of men will be steeper than those for women in contrast becker and lindsay 1994 argue that firm specific human capital leads to higher returns to tenure for women than men becker and lindsay assume that men and women have the same level of firm specific training however women have greater variance in their opportunity cost of remaining with a firm and so are more likely than men to separate inefficiently by giving women a greater share of both the costs and benefits of firm specific human capital through a steeper wage tenure profile firms reduce undesirable turnover although human capital arguments dominate the literature on gender differences in the labor market other models of wage growth predict flatter wage tenure profiles for women

job mobility and gender based wage growth differentials i introduction evidence presented by goldin 1989 o neill 1985 and others shows that the gender wage gap is narrowing much of the narrowing has been attributed to changes in female employment behavior such as the increased consistency of labor force participation and investment in education however because wages are not yet equal questions remain for example does mobility play a role in the remaining wage gap in this paper we examine the role of mobility because this has been a relatively neglected area of interest for researchers concerned about the gender wage gap some evidence on gender differences in mobility and the returns to mobility has been presented but there is little consistency in the reported evidence keith and mcwilliams 1995 demonstrate that the mobility histories of young men and women differ significantly loprest 1992 reports that for a sample of individuals who worked full time for four consecutive years young men s wages grew twice as much when they changed jobs i e employers as young women s did however abbott and beach 1994 find that the wage effects of mobility for women are similar in magnitude to the gains that mincer 1986 and holmlund 1984 find for men given the sometimes conflicting results reported so far determining the extent and the cause of gender differences in wage mobility effects has important implications for gender wage gap arguments in this study we examine the patterns and the returns to mobility for young men and women to examine mobility patterns we disaggregate mobility into involuntary or employer initiated and voluntary or employee initiated separations we further disaggregate involuntary separations into layoffs and discharges and we further disaggregate voluntary separations into family related and non family related quits by examining the impact of each of these different types of job separation on wage growth and the difference in the relative frequency of each type of separation for men and women we can make inferences about the impact of early career mobility on the gender wage gap the remainder of this paper is organized as follows in section ii we review evidence on the returns to different types of mobility in section iii we present evidence on gender differences in mobility and wage growth we use data from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy to examine the mobility patterns of men and women and to calculate average wages and average wage growth in section iv we describe how we selected a sample and specified a model for estimating the determinants of wage growth in section v we examine the wage growth effects of different types of mobility controlling for starting wages and individuals fixed effects in section vi we discuss our conclusions ii the returns to different types of mobility workers change jobs for different reasons some voluntary and some involuntary there is some evidence that the returns to different types of mobility differ not surprisingly there is consistent evidence that employee initiated separations quits increase wage growth and that employer initiated separations layoffs and discharges decrease wage growth relative to staying with the same employer 1 additional evidence on the job mobility and wage growth of men has been offered as well bartel and borjas 1981 show that job related quits have a larger positive impact on wage growth than do non job related quits with the highest wage growth resulting from those quits that are associated with successful job shopping parsons 1989 shows that for young men an employer initiated separation with prejudice a discharge results in a larger wage penalty than an employer initiated separation without prejudice a layoff keith 1993 and keith and mcwilliams 1995 show that the number of previous discharges decreases and the number of previous job related quits increases the current wage for samples of young men

below the line poverty in latin america abstract despite gains in basic welfare indicators poverty remains prevalent in latin america this paper surveys existing data on poverty in the region and discusses the relationship between growth inequality and poverty given the inequality of income distribution in latin america and the slow growth of output policies to overcome poverty must involve more efficient allocation of government resources redistribution and foreign aid

marital status child rearing and earnings differentials in the graduate labour market differential the importance of family role specialisation for the measurement of the residual earnings differential is examined within a sample selection model of participation and earnings the earnings differential between men and women may be divided into that explained by different characteristics and attributes and that due to residual factors one element of this residual may be discrimination although other factors may be incorporated in the unexplained component the residual also incorporates the effects on earnings associated with the production of home goods see polachek ig75 a b these will occur

is there a wage bonus from drinking unobserved heterogeneity examined while the result that drinkers earn more than abstainers has been remarkably persistent only one paper in the literature on drinking and earnings has been written where individual fixed effects are included this study improves the current literature by utilizing a much longer panel and focuses on the low end of drinking while controlling for unobserved heterogeneity with the inclusion of individual specific effects it is found that while ols specifications yield a positive significant coefficient on current drinking even when a rich set of covariates is controlled for including individual fixed effects renders the coefficient statistically insignificant

why the gender gap in wages narrowed in the 1980s since 1976 the gender gap in wages on average declined by about 1 per year this article focuses on identifying the factors underlying this trend three data sets are analyzed the current population survey the panel study of income dynamics and the national longitudinal survey we find that convergence in measurable work related characteristics schooling and work experience explains one third to one half the narrowing the remainder is attributable to a relative increase in women s returns to experience as well as to declining wages in blue collar work and other factors

a study of wages and reliability this article studies the role of reliability on the wage rate reliability is defined in the sense of showing up for scheduled work over an extended period just as reliability is an important determinant of product prices a worker s reliability ought to be an important determinant of his or her wage moreover while workers are not conveniently packaged by brand name firms form expectations about reliability across identifiable groups of workers and thus effectively attach brand names to workers based on their observable characteristics a worker s wage depends on his own track record and the reputation for reliability of his identifiable group using robust measures of reliability i find that observed reliability and expected reliability substantially affect the wage rate and that about half of the gender wage gap can be explained by differences in expected reliability between men and women in the workforce

the urban informal sector in uruguay its internal structure characteristics and effects abstract the literature on third world urbanization has focused increasingly on the informal sector as a mechanism to explain first the survival strategies of the poor excluded from regular employment and second the strategies of formal firms to bypass regulatory constraints and reduce costs this paper pursues these lines of research in a special context namely that of uruguay a small country which followed a protective labor policy for many years but reversed it during the 1970s and early 1980s data come from a sample of 700 households in montevideo which are representative of the low income neighborhoods that comprise approximately two thirds of the city s population interviews were held in 1983 1984 the analysis focuses on the following issues 1 the proportion of individuals and households who participate in the informal economy 2 the types of informality that exist in both principal and secondary occupations 3 the effects of informal employment on income 4 differences in age sex and education between different types of workers 5 changes in informal employment over time implications of findings for general definitions and hypotheses about the informal sector are examined the relationship of results to the neoliberal experiments attempted in uruguay between 1973 and 1984 is discussed

a theory of quits and layoffs with efficient turnover this paper answers the efficient turnover literature s long silence regarding the quit layoff distinction treating quits as worker initiated separations and layoffs as firm initiated separations i establish that the existence of layoffs is compatible with optimizing workers and firms forming and dissolving employment matches to exploit all the gains from trade the efficient turnover approach is shown to be consistent with many empirical regularities that distinguish quits from layoffs structural implications of the model are tested on data from the psid

marital status and earnings of young men a model with endogenous selection it is a matter of course in applied labor economics to presume that marital status is a predetermined contributor to earnings among young males we find no evidence to support that proposition we estimate a model of earnings determination that permits endogenous selection of marital status our estimates are based on a sample of young employed males from the michigan panel survey of income dynamics they indicate that marital status viewed in this manner does not significantly shift the mean earnings profile our sensitivity tests indicate that this conclusion is robust with respect to a variety of alternative specifications excerpt

vocational training and gender wages and occupational mobility among young workers this paper investigates the relationship between the gender wage gap the choice of training occupation and occupational mobility we use longitudinal data for young workers with apprenticeship training in west germany workers make occupational career choices early during their careers and women and men pursue very different occupational careers we reconsider whether through occupational segregation women are locked in low wage careers kunze 2005 or whether they can move up to higher wage paths through mobility we furthermore investigate whether patterns have changed across cohorts during the period 1975 and 2001 and whether effects vary across the distribution the main results are first while there exists a persistent gender wage gap over experience the gap has decreased over time second in the lower part of the wage distribution the gap is highest and it increases with experience third occupational mobility is lower for women than for men and the wage gains due to occupational mobility are higher for men than for women especially in the lower part of the wage distribution we conclude that occupational mobility has reduced the gender wage gap but lock in effects are still stronger for women compared to men

wages and job mobility of young workers this paper presents a discrete time version of jovanovic s model of worker firm matching descriptive evidence is presented that supports the notion that unobserved worker firm heterogeneity is an important component in the intertemporal structure of wages for young workers a structural econometric model of wage dynamics under worker firm sorting is developed and estimated finally a formal test of the matching model is carried out and the matching structure on intertemporal covariances of wages is not rejected my results indicate the necessity of jointly considering processes of turnover and wage growth when analyzing the labor market experiences of young workers

the wage effects of cumulative job mobility this analysis of data from the national longitudinal survey of youth shows that cumulative job mobility had statistically significant effects on wages in the years 1979 88 the direction of the wage effects positive or negative and their magnitude varied depending on the type of cumulative mobility examined employee initiated versus employerinitiated separations economic versus family related quits layoffs versus discharges the results also indicate that although men and women had different mobility histories men for example had been discharged more often than women and women had quit for family related reasons more often than men the wage effects of each type of cumulative mobility economic quits family related quits layoffs and discharges were similar for men and women tn this paper we examine the impact of cumulative job mobility on the subsequent wages of young men and women most previous work on this subject has focused on the impact of specific mobility events such as quits or layoffs rather than on the impact of total job history on wages researchers looking at single mobility decisions have consistently reported evidence that a change in employers does affect a worker s subsequent wage therefore it is reasonable to ask whether the impact ofjob change is cumulative that is does a worker s current wage reflect the impact of all past mobility decisions quits layoffs and discharges also since most of the

legal minimum wages and employment duration 1 introductionthe effect of a legal minimum wage on employee turnover is an important consideration when evaluating the effectiveness of a minimum wage policy if an increase in the minimum wage results in greater turnover then firms hiring costs are increased and the direct benefit to workers who are paid the minimum wage may be lessened a reduction in turnover on the other hand would mean more stability for employers and workers though access to minimum wage jobs may be reduced for job seekers despite the recent proliferation of studies on the effects of legal minimum wages their impact on turnover has received relatively little attention from economists this may be due to the fact that much of the literature focuses on the teen labor market where there is more churning than in the adult labor market gardecki and neumark 1998 the fact remains however that a significant proportion of workers hired at the minimum wage are adults and the effects of the minimum wage onthe turnover hazard are understudied 1standard economic theory suggests that a price floor such as a minimum wage results in fewer transactions and in rents for those suppliers who manage to sell in the context of the labor market this means workers in minimum wage jobs may be expected to receive rents and therefore may be less likely to quit another possible consequence of a minimum wage arises from imperfect information in the labor market combined with heterogeneity among workers and jobs prior to the start of an employment relationship the worker does not know all the relevant aspects of the job and the employer does not know all the important characteristics of the worker as a result in the absence of a mandated minimum wage job applicants may use wage offers to infer information about the nonpecuniary aspects of jobs thereby facilitating the matching process a binding minimum wage compresses the wage distribution so that a single wage is associated with a larger array of jobs this means that the wage offer becomes a poor indicator of a job s nonwage characteristics which leads to a higher proportion of poor matches and consequently more turnover this paper uses data on young men and women in the 1988 1994 rounds of the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy to estimate the relationship between the minimum wage and the turnover hazard the extent to which the minimum wage binds varies across states both because of differences in state laws and because of differences in wage levels across states we exploit this variation to estimate turnover hazards as a function of the ratio of the nominal minimum wage to the state median wage this variable measures the extent to which the minimum wage binds we find some evidence that in states where the minimum wage is low relative to the state s median wage men hired at the minimum wage have lower employee initiated separation hazards than other low wage workers as the minimum wage rises relative to the prevailing median wage that is as the minimum wage becomes more binding men hired at the minimum wage are increasingly likely to leave their jobs at any given duration when the minimum wage is high relative to the median wage we find that men hired at the minimum wage have significantly higher employee initiated separation hazards than other low wage workers we interpret these findings as evidence that while rents may accrue to minimum wage workers the job matching process is undermined when the minimum wage binds our results apply to the men in our sample but not to the women indeed for women we find no connection between employment duration and the starting wage rate though we do uncover some evidence that for women in low wage jobs employment duration is more elastic with respect to the presence of family friendly fringe benefits than it is for men the paper proceeds as follows the next section explores the possible reasons minimum wages would affect turnover and discusses the existing empirical and theoretical research on this topic

works councils wages and job satisfaction we investigate the effects of works councils on employees wages and job satisfaction in general and for subgroups with respect to sex and occupational status making use of a german representative sample of employees we find that employees who move to a firm with a works council report increases in job satisfaction but do not receive particular wage increases especially the job satisfaction of female employees is affected by a change in works council status however we do not find support for the hypothesis that the introduction of a works council itself increases wages or job satisfaction for the employees staying at the firm

job mobility and wage trajectories for men and women in the united states young american workers typically change employers many times in the course of establishing their careers this article examines the consequences of this mobility for wage inequalities between and among men and women using multilevel modeling and data from the 1979 to 2002 waves of the national longitudinal survey of youth 1979 nlsy79 i disentangle the various ways in which mobility shapes the trajectories of wage growth findings caution against accepting the adequacy of prevalent economic models of mobility models that tend to isolate individual workers moves from broader patterns of work history and that treat mobility as a decontextualized individual choice although workers who frequently switch employers generally end up earning less than their more stable counterparts the type timing and relative level of changes strongly affect the ultimate wage differential differences in the degree of men s and women s labor force attachment and family circumstances are also influential workers who are l

the impact of employer provided health insurance on dynamic employment transitions we estimate the impact of employer provided health insurance ephi on the job mobility of males over time using a dynamic empirical model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity previous studies of job lock reach different conclusions about possible distortions in labor mobility stemming from an employment based health insurance system a few authors find no evidence of job lock although most find reductions in the mobility of insured workers of between 20 and 40 percent we use data from the national longitudinal survey of youth which includes variables describing the health insurance an individual holds as well as whether he is offered insurance by his employer this additional information allows us to model the latent individual characteristics that are correlated with the offer of ephi the acceptance of ephi and employment transitions our results provide an estimate of job lock unbiased through correlation with positive job characteristics and individual specific turnover propensity we find no evidence of job lock among married males and produce small estimates of job lock among unmarried males of between 10 and 15 percent

the job search behavior of employed youth an employed worker s search strategies include 1 employed not searching 2 employed searching and 3 unemployed searching the last requires that the worker quit to search under plausible assumptions on search costs the optimal algorithm involves a dual reservation wage strategy burdett 1978 the probability of on the job search increases as the current wage decreases relative to the distribution of alternative wages if the wage is sufficiently low the searcher quits to search substituting time for financial outlays estimates based on the national longitudinal survey of youth indicate that these calculations characterize the search strategies of young workers copyright 1991 by mit press

is price flexibility destabilizing abstract increased price flexibility causes temporary output deviations to be eliminated more quickly but it also makes the effects of inflationary expectations on aggregate demand larger so it can lead to increased output variability this trade off is assessed for an open economy and only limited support is found for keynes concern that increased price flexibility is destabilizing the dependence of this issue on exchange rate policy and on alternative specifications for sticky prices is emphasized

empirical age earnings profiles the human capital earnings function in which earnings are expressed as a quadratic in potential experience is probably the most widely accepted empirical specification in economics in spite of its widespread acceptance the human capital earnings function provides a very poor approximation of the true empirical relationship between earnings and experience the standard formulation understates early career earnings growth by about 30 50 and overstates midcareer growth by 20 50 however simple alternative specifications that fit the data are available

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

male female disparity in starting pay empirical studies of the earnings of male and female workers persistently reveal a gap that is unexplained by the economic variables in these models this gap has been given two interpretations in the literature one holds that the gap reflects non market forces which distort the equilibrium relation among the wages of competing workers discrimination according to this view prevents female workers from being offered jobs commensurate with their qualifications and crowds them into low productivity occupations 2 the alternative interpretation holds that some substantial portion of the gap is an artifact the result of missing variables biased parameters or measurement error these researchers view the labor market as highly competitive and were it possible to correct for all these statistical problems the measured wage gap would largely vanish 3 this research belongs to the latter category we argue that a portion of the measured gap at least that observed between the earnings of young men and women during their first few years with their employers reflects sex related differences in the shares of investment in firm specific human capital borne by workers of each group moreover these variations in investment levels are freely chosen by women and in no way imply long run deficits in their earning power on the contrary the model predicts steeper earnings profiles of women who undertake this firm specific investment thus women s earnings are predicted eventually to overtake and surpass those of equally qualified men this theory was developed in earlier research by becker and lindsay 2 based on a model of hashimoto 11 12 and extensions by parsons 21 we argued that young women for nondiscriminatory reasons elect to shoulder a larger share of this investment than young men the explanation for this is developed in two stages the first derives the terms under which both male and female workers share the investment with their employers the second argues that female workers will be led by these considerations to bear a larger share workers of both sexes agree to enter into inflexible wage contracts with employers specifying a share of the investment i e a wage deduction from current mvp and a post investment wage the advantage to such contracts lies in the solution to an assymetric information problem the

is there a male marital wage premium new evidence from the united states this study reconsiders the phenomenon that married men earn more money than unmarried men a key result of the research on marriage benefits many earlier studies have found such a male marital wa

where to go workers reasons to quit and intra vs interindustry job mobility we show that workers reasons for quitting their job affect their decision to stay in or leave their industry using survey data among public sector employees in the netherlands workers quitting for e g pay work pressure or job duties move relatively often to another industry in contrast to workers quitting for commuting time or the atmosphere at work this suggests that workers use their experience in the initial job to update their expectations on other jobs in the industry as the first set of job aspects is more likely to be related among jobs within an industry than the latter furthermore it is shown that workers reasons to quit fully explain the differences in wage growth between intra and interindustry job movers lastly we find that workers who quit for pay or management often leave the public sector altogether the data used in this article are proprietary

the effect of naturalization on wage growth a panel study of young male immigrants for young male immigrants naturalization facilitates assimilation into the u s labor market following naturalization immigrants gain access to public sector white collar and union jobs and wage growth accelerates consistent with removal of employment barriers the faster wage growth of immigrants who naturalize might alternatively result from greater human capital investment prior to naturalization stemming from a long term commitment to u s labor markets but there is no evidence that wage growth accelerates or the distribution of jobs improves until citizenship is attained finally the gains from naturalization are greater for immigrants from less developed countries and persist when we control for unobserved productivity

the wage and employment dynamics of minimum wage workers this study uses panel data to examine the wage and employment dynamics of minimum wage workers compared with workers earning above the minimum minimum wage workers are much more likely to be new entrants or to exit the labor market changes in industry occupation and access to job training are particularly important to improving the wages of minimum wage workers many minimum wage workers earn less than their potential wage temporarily because of nonwork circumstances that make higher paying jobs less attractive duration of minimum wage employment at one extreme if minimum wage workers were entry level workers who quickly accumulate skills that push their wages above the minimum a minimum wage hike would have a relatively short term effect on any given worker s income on the other extreme if all minimum wage workers find themselves in dead end jobs that provide no opportunities for wage growth a hike in the minimum wage could have long term effects on their incomes there are several studies that provide insights into the wage growth of minimum wage workers using 1984 1985 data from the survey of income and program participation sipp smith and vavrichek 1992 show that over 60 of workers earning the minimum wage in 1984 were earning more than the minimum wage one year later for those with wage gains the typical wage increase was approximately 20 long 1999 finds similar results using the 1992 1993 sipp using national longitudinal survey data from the early 1980s schiller 1994 finds that after entering a minimum wage job only 15 of continuing workers were still earning the minimum wage after three years while most minimum wage workers realize sufficient wage growth to rise above the minimum wage relatively quickly a significant minority does not the existing literature provides some insight into which workers are most likely to be stuck at the minimum a fairly consistent finding is that less educated workers and part time workers are less likely to rise above the minimum however the understanding of the processes at work in determining the extent of wage growth is limited

anticipatory sorting and gender segregation in temporary employment we examine the roots of gender segregation in the screening process by using a longitudinal data set of candidates considered for temporary projects at a staffing firm and following their progress through the hiring pipeline theories invoked to explain gender segregation across jobs traditionally rely on firm specific human capital and expectations of future commitment to explain this phenomenon these do not apply in this setting yet we find that the staffing firm is more likely to shortlist women for low paid projects and less likely to do so for high paid ones these effects are due to women being considered for different projects than men and associated at least partially to the level of competition within vacancies although client companies also exhibit some gender sorting behavior in the later steps of the hiring process they are more likely to prefer women and less likely to sort them into lower paid projects our findings are consistent with anticipatory gender sorting mechanisms by which first screeners generate segregation when narrowing down the pool of candidates for later decision makers we discuss the implications of this case for theories of gender stratification and workplace inequality especially in mediated labor markets this paper was accepted by jesper sorensen organizations

price flexibility and aggregate stability new evidence and implications i introduction is increased price flexibility stabilizing the importance of this question can be easily established by observing the number of recently published papers in which this question or a slight modification of it has appeared in their titles 1 while most economists would answer this question affirmatively a strand of macroeconomic thought that questions the wisdom of too much price flexibility has recently regained some attention 2 in the most widely discussed of this recent literature delong and summers 1986b question the wisdom of too much price flexibility their work was motivated by some of the ideas expressed by keynes 1936 and formally articulated by james tobin 1975 low prices work to move the economy to full employment but falling prices to the extent that they lead to expectations of deflation raise the real interest rate through the mundell effect and move the economy away from full employment in a version of taylor s 1979 wage setting model delong and summers show that instability is likely to occur if expectations of inflation adjust rapidly to actual inflation and the real interest rate effect is large this view presents a direct challenge to mainstream keynesian models of business cycles 3 according to these models sluggish wages and prices are generally the culprits of unemployment and business fluctuations an exogenous institutional increase in the degree of price inflexibility increases the size of quantities adjustment in response to aggregate demand shocks in the current period and over time the assumption of exogeneity is consistent with the view that wage and price rigidity are the result of an institutional structure that is relatively unresponsive to changes in the underlying economic conditions in gray and kandil 1991 we find this view unappealing considering recent efforts to rationalize nominal rigidities as the outcome of explicit optimization exercises 4 it is for this reason that we examine the relationship between price flexibility and output variability in a framework in which both are endogenously determined in the model we develop price rigidity is attributed to the length of contractual wage agreements an increase in contract length will occur if the costs of negotiating contracts rise or the amount of uncertainty impinging on the economy declines in the first case declines in wage and price flexibility will be accompanied by decreased stability of output in the latter case the opposite will occur the reduction in the size of stochastic disturbances impinging on the economic system has a direct stabilizing impact on real output concurrently the reduction in the degree of uncertainty increases agents incentives to write longer contracts the increased rigidity is destabilizing this destabilizing impact is dominated however by the direct stabilizing impact the implications of the alternative views can be contrasted in many respects in kandil 1991b i test the relation between measures of wage and price flexibility and the size of macroeconomic fluctuations across a group of ten major industrial countries the analysis of this paper extends this research in several directions first the analysis provides a formal illustration of the channels through which price flexibility may differentiate the real effects of specific shocks underlying aggregate demand and in turn aggregate variability the framework approximates the key relationships for the theoretical debate under consideration these relationships are replicated empirically to establish the validity of the hypotheses that differentiate the alternative views second the analysis provides a more formal attempt towards quantifying the structural shocks underlying aggregate demand these shocks are the driving forces of economic instability and in turn they are crucial to the debate on the stabilizing effects of price flexibility

evolution of the marriage earnings gap for women abstract using survey of income and program participation sipp panels linked to social security earnings records we examine the earnings gap associated with marriage for cohorts of women born between 1936 and 1975 we compare ordinary least squares and fixed effect estimates we find that among women who work the marital earnings gap has all but disappeared in fixed effects estimates for recent birth cohorts in fact among women without children married women earn more than single women implying a diminished role for specialization when children are not present in contrast the motherhood earnings gap remains large even for recent birth cohorts

longitudinal analyses of the effects of trade unions but union members are different from nonmembers in unobserved ways biasing your estimates y ou should make a selectivity bias correction simultaneously determine union status and economic outcomes develop an unobservables model use longitudinal data archetypical comment on virtually any study of the economic effects of umomsm or suitably modified on any other empirical subject

examining the wage differential for married and cohabiting men leslie s stratton i introduction wage analyses almost universally indicate that married men earn more than do single men even after controlling for observable human capital characteristics the same appears to be true for cohabiting men research has failed as yet to reach a consensus regarding the nature of these differentials the evidence is consistent with a number of alternative explanations first marriage could increase men s market productivity because economies of scale and increased specialization within a multiperson household give them more time and energy to devote to market related activities if this is the mechanism driving the marital wage differential then cohabiting men may also experience a wage boost albeit a smaller one as cohabitation is a less stable relationship and less likely to engender specialization wages could jump at the start of a relationship but an increased focus on market related activities is more likely to cause wages to rise at a faster pace alternatively men who marry or cohabit may be inher ently different from men who do not if men are selected into relationships based on their earnings ability then cross section wage analyses will indicate a wage differential for married and cohabiting men but difference estimation will not the goal of this analysis is to shed light on the nature of the marital and cohabitation wage premiums for men by estimating wage models that permit both differential wage growth and selection effects ii literature review evidence of a marital wage premium for men abounds a thorough literature review is beyond the scope of this article but incorporation of a marital dummy in wage specifications for men is fairly standard hill 1979 provides one much cited work empirical estimates in the range of 10 to 30 are typical a number of researchers have explored the nature of this wage differential one explanation focuses on the marital decision itself the argument being that men who are inherently more productive are more sought after marriage partners and hence more likely to marry this is the selection model attempts such as that by nakosteen and zimmer 1987 to estimate a model in which marital status and wages are endogenously determined have yielded inconclusive results and are sensitive to identification restrictions an alternative approach less subject to specification error is to estimate a fixed effects specification that eliminates all individual specific time invariant characteristics 1 researchers korenman and neumark 1991 bartlett and callahan 1984 daniel 1991 and gray 1997 have employed this technique and continue to observe a significant marital wage differential indicating that selection effects do not explain the entire differential gray 1997 finds some evidence that the premium has declined over time as he does not find a significant marital wage differential using data from the national longitudinal survey of youth nlsy the most recent cohort of data tested however daniel 1991 also uses data from the nlsy and he finds a significant marital wage differential of about the same magnitude as that obtained from older cohorts generally speaking a comparison of cross section and panel results suggests that less than 20 of the marital wage differential is attributable to individual specific components or selectivity if selection alone does not explain the differential then wages must increase following marriage wages could be higher because they jump or because they rise more rapidly following marriage empirical estimates reported by kenny 1983 using the coleman rossi retrospective life histories study and by korenman and neumark 1991 loh 1996 and gray 1997 using the national longitudinal study of young men suggest that the growth rate of wages increases on marriage once again results from the nlsy are mixed with daniel 1991 finding faster wage growth following marriage and gray 1997 finding no marital wage differential

from motherhood penalties to husband premia the new challenge for gender equality and family policy lessons from norway given the key role that processes occurring in the family play in creating gender inequality the family is a central focus of policies aimed at creating greater gender equality we examine how family status affects the gender wage gap using longitudinal matched employer employee data from norway 1979 96 a period with extensive expansion of family policies the motherhood penalty dropped dramatically from 1979 to 1996 among men the premia for marriage and fatherhood remained constant in 1979 the gender wage gap was primarily due to the motherhood penalty but by 1996 husband premia were more important than motherhood penalties

labor supply preferences hours constraints and hours wage tradeoffs in a labor market with tied hours wage packages and wage dispersion for a particular type of job constrained workers may be willing to sacrifice wage gains for better hours when changing jobs likewise workers may accept jobs offering undesirable hours only if the associated wage gains are large we investigate this issue empirically by examining whether overemployment and underemployment on the initial and new job affects the relation between hours changes and wage changes for quitters our results generally support the view that an individual requires compensation to work in a job that given the individual s particular preferences offers unattractive hours

human capital investment specialization and the wage effects of voluntary labor mobility ahstract analyses of voluntary labor mobility suggest that job search facilitates job change while specific training inhibits mobility further given that specific skills cannot be transferred between jobs and since both search and training are costly it is reasonable for workers to specialize in search or specific training on a given job training or search specialization however implies that estimation methods which treat the incidence of a quit as exogenous underestimate mobility effects on wages the larger wage effects reported here result from simultaneous estimation but also reflect more accurate measurement of wage growth between jobs

the decline of private sector unionism and the gender wage gap between 1973 and 1988 private sector unionism fell by 9 5 percentage points more for men than women and the gender wage gap one minus the ratio of female to male wages decreased by 09 these trends support two findings first unionism fell more slowly for women primarily because the probability of unionism fell most rapidly in jobs dominated by males second the greater decline in unionism among males is responsible for approximately one seventh of the 09 decline in the gender wage gap

price flexibility and aggregate stability some evidence contrasting developing and developed countries this paper explores the empirical validity of theoretical channels through which price flexibility may have caused differences in the stability of output in developing and developed countries the relation between these two variables suggests several principles where the size of stochastic disturbances that impinge on the economic system does not play an important role in determining the degree of price flexibility the increased flexibility is clearly stabilizing developing countries generally are characterized by larger stochastic disturbances and a higher flexibility of the price level than developed countries the larger variability of disturbances is indeed destabilizing further this destabilizing effect has domi nated the stabilizing effect that is associated with the increased flexibility of the price level in developing countries and this results in a clear positive correlation between price flexibility and output variability

bargaining sorting and the gender wage gap quantifying the impact of firms on the relative pay of women there is growing evidence that rm specic pay premiums are an important source of wage inequality these premiums will contribute to the gender wage gap if women are less likely to work at high paying rms or if women negotiate worse wage bargains with their employers than men using longitudinal data on the hourly wages of portuguese workers matched with balance sheet information for rms we show that the wages of both men and women contain rm specic premiums that are strongly correlated with employer productivity we then show how the impact of these rm specic pay dierentials on the gender wage gap can be decomposed into a combination of bargaining and sorting eects consistent with the bargaining literature we nd that women receive only 90 of the rm specic pay premiums earned by men notably we obtain very similar estimates of the relative bargaining power ratio from our analysis of between rm wage premiums and from analyzing changes in

globalization and gender wage inequality in china summary this paper uses an enterprise population level dataset to investigate the link between globalization and gender inequality in the chinese labor market we find that foreign and exporting firms employ more female workers than domestic nonexporters foreign participation and export orientation within the same region and industry significantly encourage female employment and reduce the gender wage gap furthermore we show that while a large gender wage gap exists for foreign and exporting firms it mainly reflects the difference in gender productivity gender wage discrimination is observed only among private nonexporting firms overall our results highlight the importance of globalization in encouraging female employment and reducing gender discrimination

some contacts are more equal than others informal networks job tenure and wages the explanation typically given for longer tenure among workers who use informal contacts to find jobs is that relatives and friends reduce uncertainty about the quality of the match between worker and employer an alternative explanation is that workers rely on informal information sources as a last resort such workers remain at their current jobs mainly because they have few alternative choices rather than because of better match quality this article shows that the two different explanations are simultaneously valid for different types of contacts and can account for differences in the wage effects of job contacts

cumulative gender disadvantage in contract employment women s wages do not grow with experience or tenure as much as men s do many accounts of this cumulative gender disadvantage attribute it to women s underinvestment in firm specific skills yet if that were true this disadvantage would not exist where firm specific skills are not rewarded by the labor market this article investigates this argument in the context of contract employment where demand for firm specificity is minimal contrary to expectations men still receive higher rewards than women over time drawing on quantitative evidence and qualitative fieldwork using job histories of high skill contractors affiliated with a staffing firm the author finds support for two sources of women s disadvantage lower rates of movement across clients on the supply side and unmeasured demand side factors by which similar levels of tenure and client transitions accrue lower rewards to women implications for research on gender stratification and career advancement in nonformalized labor markets are discussed

general productivity growth in a theory of quits and layoffs an efficient matching model of quits and layoffs is developed to account for several empirical regularities differences between quits and layoffs over the life and business cycles and across demographic groups are generated by differential rates of general productivity growth the standard approach to quits and layoffs based on wage rigidity is shown to be incapable of accounting for many of the empirical regularities although a formal test rejects a structural prediction of the efficient turnover model the specification does well in predicting both the level of and time series variation in the fraction of separations labeled quits