changing inequality in markets for workplace amenities among u s industries where earnings rose relatively from 1979 1995 injury rates declined relatively obversely during the 1960s narrowing interindustry wage differentials were associated with an increase in the relative risk of injury in high wage industries evidence from the nlsy suggests similar results among full time workers between 1988 and 1996 between 1973 and 1991 the disamenity of evening night work was increasingly borne by low wage male workers changing earnings inequality has understated changing inequality in the returns to work assuming skill neutral changes in the cost of reducing these disamenities estimates of the implied income elasticities of demand for amenities are well above unity

accuracy of response in labor market surveys evidence and implications this paper examines the extent of response errors in labor market survey data and explores the implications of such errors for economic analysis explicitly examined are responses to questions on industry occupation union status hours worked and wages analyses are based on two sources 1 a special supplement to the january 1977 current population survey that obtained data from workers and their employers and 2 an exact match of workers and their employers interviewed in the employment opportunity pilot project survey the dual nature of these surveys provides a basis for analyzing the effect of response error on a variety of economic analyses including the trade off between wages and risk the wage impact of unionism and the sensitivity of wage determination models to alternative responses to earnings questions

has work sharing worked in germany industry by industry basis in an attempt to raise employment whether this work sharing works is theoretically ambiguous i exploit the cross industry variation in standard hours reductions to examine their impact on actual hours worked wages and employment analysis of industry level data suggests that work sharing may have reduced employment in the period 1984 1994 using individual data from the german socio economic panel i substantiate the union claim of full wage compensation the hourly wage rose enough to offset the decline in actual hours worked

macroeconomic forecasts and microeconomic forecasters in the presence of principal agent problems published macroeconomic forecasts by professional economists may not measure expectations forecasters may use their forecasts in order to manipulate beliefs about their ability i test a cross sectional implication of models of reputation and information revelation i find that as forecasters become older and more established they produce more radical forecasts since these more radical forecasts are in general less accurate ex post forecast accuracy grows significantly worse as forecasters become older and more established these findings are consistent with reputational factors at work in professional macroeconomic forecasts

reputation and hierarchy in dynamic models of employment the employment relationship with employees ability and their actions both private information thus combining adverse selection with moral hazard is modeled as a repeated game with self enforcing contracts being perfect bayesian nash equilibria under termination contracts the equilibrium contract structure consists of a hierarchy of ranks finite in number even though ability is continuous reputation acts as an effective device for worker discipline without the need for involuntary unemployment selection by bonding is not in general incentive compatible but selection by promotion of employees through the ranks is many other features correspond to observed employment structures

self selection bias in longitudinal estimation of wage gaps cross sectional regression analyses of wage gaps may be biased by omission of unobserved worker characteristics recent studies therefore have used longitudinal data to difference out the effects of such variables this paper however shows that self selection of job changers may cause longitudinal estimation of wage gaps to be inconsistent

hedonic wages and labor market search this article investigates the consequences of labor market search for the theory of hedonic wages we find that the introduction of search has surprising consequences for the theory of hedonic wages in particular we demonstrate that the equilibrium distribution of wage and nonwage amenity bundles generally bears little resemblance to workers underlying preferences a consequence of this analysis is that estimates of workers marginal willingness to pay derived from the conventional hedonic wage methodology are biased in addition we demonstrate that search generates differences between firm level and employee level data that can cause substantial deviations in the estimates of hedonic wage equations

the right man for the job this paper describes a search model with a continuum of worker and job types free entry and transferable utility we apply a second order taylor expansion to characterize the equilibrium derive the cost of search and show that it is decreasing in the substitutability of worker types this cost of search is then decomposed into three components unemployment vacancy costs and mismatch our contact technology rules out congestion effects between different worker types and therefore exhibits increasing returns to scale one third of those increasing returns in contacts are shown to be absorbed by firms and workers being more choosy the resulting equilibrium is not efficient unemployment benefits can reduce the loss by serving as a search subsidy numerical simulations of the model show that our taylor expansions are quite accurate 2004 the review of economics studies limited

promotions and wage growth this article presents evidence that internal mobility defined as a promotion or other position change is an important source of wage growth it accounts for approximately 15 of wage growth over the life cycle for white and black men but less for women the incidence of promotions and other position changes appears tied to the wage level better paid workers are more likely to be promoted the life cycle incidence of internal mobility looks similar to that for conventionally defined job mobility most moves are made early in the career mobility declines both with time in position and with experience

worker sorting and the risk of death on the job this article examines worker sorting across occupations in response to the risk of death on the job we use family structure as a proxy for willingness to trade safety for wages to test the proposition that workers with strong aversion to this risk sort into safer jobs we estimate conditional logit models of occupation choice as a function of injury risk and other job attributes our results confirm the sorting hypothesis within gender single moms and dads are the most averse to risk overall differences in the risk of death across occupations explain about one quarter of occupational gender segregation

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

accounting for the changing role of family income in determining college entry in this paper i analyze the determinants of college enrolment and the changes in these determinants over time i propose a quantitative life cycle model with college enrolment altruistic parents provide financial support to their children using counterfactual experiments i find that 24 percent of all households are financially constrained in their college decision constraints become more severe over time i show that my model is consistent with a narrow college enrolment gap between students from rich and poor families as previously reported in the empirical literature the estimation of enrolment gaps is a popular reduced form approach for measuring the fraction of constrained households my results suggest that these reduced form estimates are misleading and that a structural model of parental transfers is needed to correctly identify constrained households further i show that parental transfers are an important driver behind the changing role of family income as a determinant of college entry a fact that is well documented for the us economy

estimating compensating wage differentials using voluntary job changes evidence from germany the author develops a model predicting that in a labor market that attaches a wage premium to jobs with a disamenity a compensating wage differential the premium s upper bound will be defined by the average wage change of voluntary job movers whose consumption of the disamenity rises as a result of their move its lower bound by the wage change of those whose consumption of the disamenity falls these predictions will not hold if as predicted by a segmented labor market model the labor market attaches a wage penalty to workplace disamenities using longitudinal data on job characteristics and wages in germany in 1984 2001 the author estimates the market returns to four workplace disamenities heavy workload job insecurity poor hours regulation and a mismatch between skills possessed and skills required the results broadly support the existence of compensating differentials in the german labor market

real wage cyclicality of job stayers within company job movers and between company job movers using the british new earnings survey panel data nespd for the period 1975 to 2001 we estimate the wage cyclicality of job stayers those remaining within single jobs in a given company within company job movers and between company job movers we also examine how the proportion of internal and external job moves varies over the business cycle we find that the wages of internal movers are slightly more procyclical and wages of external movers considerably more procyclical than those of stayers notwithstanding a decomposition shows that in britain wage cyclicality arises almost entirely from the procyclicality of wages for job stayers with across and within firm mobility playing a lesser role thus there is little evidence for rigid wage models that imply that employers use changes in job titles as a means of adjusting wages to the business cycle we also show that the distinctions between private and public sectors and between workers covered and uncovered by collective agreements have important impacts on the wage estimates of both stayers and movers

is job stability declining in germany evidence from count data models the macro evidence of increased adjustment pressure since the early 1970s suggests that job mobility should have increased hence retrospective and spell data from the german socio economic panel are combined in order to test the hypothesis that job stability for german workers declined between 1974 and 1994 using count data regression models in which we control for labour market experience various demographic factors and occupation we find that job stability did not decrease but if anything increased between 1974 and 1994 our finding suggests that labour market inflexibility is an important factor in explaining the european unemployment problem

does unmeasured ability explain inter industry wage differentials this paper provides empirical assessments of the two leading explanations of measured inter industry wage differentials 1 true wage differentials exist across industries and 2 the measured differentials simply reflect unmeasured differences in workers productive abilities first we summarize the existing evidence on the unmeasured ability explanation second we construct a simple model which shows that if matching is important then endogenous job change decisions can create important self selection biases even in first differenced estimates of industry wage differentials third we analyze a sample that approximates the experiment of exogenous job loss we find that i the wage change experienced by a typical industry switcher closely resembles the difference in the relevant industry differentials estimated in a cross section and ii pre displacement industry affiliation plays an important role in post displacement wage determination

the pricing of job characteristics when markets do not clear theory and policy implications this article examines nonsequential search when jobs vary with respect to nonpecuniary characteristics in the presence of frictions in the labor market the equilibrium job distribution need not show evidence of compensating wage differentials the model also generates several pervasive features of labor markets unemployment and vacancies apparent discrimination and market segmentation when workers are homogeneous restrictions on the range of job offers decrease welfare and cannot reduce unemployment however when workers have heterogeneous preferences such restrictions may lower unemployment and can even lead to a pareto improvement in welfare we consider the impact of policies banning discrimination and regulating working conditions

an examination of the utility bearing characteristics of occupations a factor analytical approach abstract this paper examines the utility bearing characteristics intrinsic to occupations and their effect on wages a factor analysis finds that occupational characteristics can be summarized by a fewer number of underlying factors this research identifies four factors which significantly influence wages

estimating workers marginal willingness to pay for job attributes using duration data this paper develops and applies a method for estimating workers marginal willingess to pay for job attributes when workers job choices are characterized by imperfect information and labor market search as an application this paper analyzes the job durations of white males using data from the national longitudinal survey youth cohort and the dictionary of occupational titles estimates of workers willingness to pay derived from the job duration model are compared with those derived from an hedonic wage model

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

do workers accept lower wages in exchange for health benefits compensating wage theory predicts that workers receiving more generous fringe benefits are paid a lower wage than comparable workers who prefer fewer fringe benefits this study tests this prediction for employer provided health insurance by modeling the wages of married women employed full time in the labor market husband s union status husband s firm size and husband s health coverage through his job are used as instruments for his wife s own employer health insurance benefits the estimates suggest wives with own employer health insurance accept a wage about 20 lower than what they would have received working in a job without benefits