Wage Components Research Articles

Atypical Work and Pay

Atypical work has long been criticized in popular debate as providing poorly compensated, precarious employment. Yet the empirical evidence is both incomplete and mixed. The main contribution of the present paper is to estimate wage differences for the full set of these alternative work arrangements while simultaneously controlling for observed demographic characteristics and unobserved person‐specific fixed effects. The paper also allows for the skewness in atypical worker earnings while retaining the Mincerian human capital earnings function. Our improved estimates are consistent with some of the more optimistic findings reported in the literature, the caveat being that we are examining here only the wage component of the total compensation package.

Bargaining Regimes and Wage Dispersion

Summary Collective wage contracts impose restrictions on wage-setting. We utilize German linked employer-employee data for blue-collar worker to compute the dispersion of wages and wage components within and across firms under three different wage-setting regimes: Establishments applying industry-wide collective contracts, establishments with firm-level contracts and uncovered establishments. The empirical analysis confirms a lower dispersion of wages and in particular “worker quality indices” for firms applying sectoral collective contracts compared to companies in the other two wage-setting regimes. Between the years 1990, 1995 and 2001 the dispersion of wages increases, and this is valid too for firms covered by industry-wide collective contracts. A sensitivity analysis demonstrates that the results retain their statistical significance and do not change qualitatively if we modify the minimum firm size (establishments with at least 50,100 and 250 employees) or take into account the endogeneity of tenure or self-selection of workers into bargaining regimes.

The Structure of Worker Compensation in Brazil, with a Comparison to France and the United States

We employ a comprehensive matched employer-employee data set for Brazil to analyze wage determinants and compare results to Abowd, Kramarz, Margolis and Troske (2001) for French and U.S. manufacturing. Returns to education and experience in Brazilian manufacturing exceed those of the other countries, while occupation differentials are similar. The gender differential in Brazilian and U.S. manufacturing coincides, and is considerably smaller than in France. Estimates are unaffected by selectivity of Brazilian workers into formal employment. The links between firm performance and wage components in Brazil resemble those of France. Worker characteristics have comparable explanatory power for manufacturing wage variability in the three countries but establishment-fixed effects explain relatively less of the Brazilian wage variation. Despite the inclusion of establishment effects, regressors predict at most sixty percent of wage variability in any Brazilian sector, suggesting that explanations for earnings variability ought to focus on worker characteristics, not establishment wage policies.

Firmwide Versus Establishment-Specific Labor Market Practices

We construct a novel data set matching occupational data from separate establishments to the establishments' corporate parents, in order to study labor market links across establishments within diverse firms. We find substantial wage components common to all establishments within firms, even after netting out industry and occupation effects. However, employment changes are localized to establishments. The data suggest that internal labor markets of multiestablishment firms are linked throughout their entire organizations, but that establishment-level demand shocks do not permeate the firm.

Permanent and Transitory Wage Inequality of British Men, 1975-2001: Year, Age and Cohort Effects

We examine the variance-covariance structure of log-wages over time and over the lifecycle of British men from 1975 to 2001, hereby controlling for cohort effects. Wage inequality has risen sharply during the 1980’s and early 1990’s and remained fairly constant in the second half of the 1990’s. We show that this increase is caused mainly by a strong increase in the transitory wage inequality and only to a lesser extent to an increase in the permanent wage inequality. The transitory component of wages is, however, highly persistent over time: serial correlation decreases from 0.88 over a one-year period to 0.65 over a ten-year period. The constant wage inequality in the second half of the 1990’s is attributed to a slight decrease in permanent wages inequality, a stabilization of the variance of the transitory wage shock, and the strong decrease in the transitory wage inequality for the cohorts entering employment since the end of the 1980’s. Ignoring age effects in transitory wage inequality and cohort effects, as is commonly done, leads to severely distorted inferences concerning the changes in permanent wage inequality.

Economic Integration and Convergence: A Second Decomposition Method

In this Journal, Sukkoo Kim investigates the sources of income convergence and divergence across regions in the United States. Kim argues that there are two sources of income convergence in regional economies linked by trade: convergence in regional wage rates and convergence in regional industry mixes. Using U.S. regional data on industry mix and worker income by industry, Kim decomposes differences in regional incomes into industry wage and industry-mix components. From his decompositions, Kim concludes that changing regional industrial structures “played an important role in causing the divergence and convergence of U.S. regional income per capita” in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries..

Fiscal Policy, Profits, and Investment

This paper evaluates the effects of fiscal policy on investment using a panel of OECD countries. We find a sizeable negative effect of public spending—and in particular of its wage component— on profits and on business investment. This result is consistent with different theoretical models in which government employment creates wage pressure for the private sector. Various types of taxes also have negative effects on profits, but, interestingly, the effects of government spending on investment are larger than those of taxes. Our results can explain the so-called “non-Keynesian” (i.e., expansionary) effects of fiscal adjustments.

Empirical Tests of Efficiency Wage Models

Two‐digit manufacturing industry‐level production functions are used to test efficiency wage propositions. Conclusive tests require functional forms which allow differences in elasticities of substitution between observable human capital, wage premia and other inputs. Results demonstrate that unexplained industry wage premia and higher unemployment rates raise productivity. Wage premia and the human capital wage component cannot be aggregated into a single human capital index. Nevertheless, 88% of the productivity effect associated with industry wages can be tied to observable human capital in the industry, with only 12% associated with the wage premium.

Stylized Facts of Government Finance in the G-7

The stylized facts of government finance in the Group of Seven (G-7) industrial countries show that revenues lag real GDP procyclically, while government spending in most cases fails to lead the economy procyclically. This finding is not confined to transfers but also applies to the wage component of government consumption as well as, in most cases, to government fixed investment. Government deficits are always countercyclical but there is little evidence that stabilization is equally successful in stimulating the economy before shocks materialize.

Stylized Facts of Government Finance in the G-7

The stylized facts of government finance in the Group of Seven (G-7) industrial countries show that revenues lag real GDP procyclically, while government spending in most cases fails to lead the economy procyclically. This finding is not confined to transfers but also applies to the wage component of government consumption as well as, in most cases, to government fixed investment. Government deficits are always countercyclical but there is little evidence that stabilization is equally successful in stimulating the economy before shocks materialize.

Wage dynamics in Israel: market forces and spillover effects

The path of real wages in Israel since the July 1985 stabilization programme-an initial decline followed by excessive wage increases-is not fully explained by macroeconomic variables. The interaction of wage changes across industries is shown to play a key role in the development of average wages: exogenous shocks affect industries unevenly, setting off a short-run wage-comparison process between the different industries. These dynamics act in combination with longer-run competitive forces, while in the very long run the wage system converges to a stable structure. One implication of the analysis is that excessive restraint of the uniform nation-wide wage component may in fact lead to higher overall wage increases. It also helps to explain the persistence of the post-stabilization rate of inflation.

AMENITIES VERSUS LABOR MARKET OPPORTUNITIES: CHOOSING THE OPTIMAL DISTANCE TO MOVE*

ABSTRACT. A recent debate in the regional economics literature has focused attention on the motivation behind an individual's decision to migrate. Human‐capital migration models emphasize labor market disequilibria whereas alternative (hedonic) migration models stress households’altered demand for nontraded goods. In this paper, we test the relative importance of these two possible motivations for moving between metropolitan areas. We use an intercity hedonic model to decompose wages into equilibrium and disequilibrium components. We then compare the separate influences of amenities and the disequilibrium component of wages on the distance moved between two metropolitan areas. Our findings indicate that both economic factors and amenity differentials are significant factors in explaining regional migration.

Real Wages over the Business Cycle: Estimating the Impact of Heterogeneity with Micro Data

One of the oldest questions in macroeconomics concerns the correlation between the business cycle and the real wage. We provide new evidence on this question by examining the possible bias that arises when (1) workers have unobserved characteristics that affect their wages and (2) those workers who move in and out of the work force over the cycle have unobserved characteristics systematically different from those who stay in. We distinguish as well between the bias that arises from those unobserved characteristics that are permanent components of wages and those that are transitory. We utilize micro, panel data, and maximum likelihood selectivity bias techniques to estimate both the extent of this selectivity-cum-aggregation bias and the true effect of the cycle on real wages. We find that selectivity bias is present: workers are more likely to lose employment during a recession if they have high wages, especially if they have a high transitory wage component. Overall, the effect of selectivity is to bias ordinary least squares estimates based only on workers in a procyclical direction. Our results show that the true effect of the cycle on wages is still procyclical but much smaller in magnitude than previous estimates using micro data have suggested.

Determinants of the rate of subdivision development

The subdivision development process is reviewed and an assessment made of the factors which affect the rate at which vacant single-family detached lots come onto the market. A one-equation behavioral model of this flow is then formulated and estimated. The empirical results indicate that, in addition to seasonal factors which affect the flow of lots, the rate of interest and the wage component of servicing costs have an inverse effect on this flow, and the selling price of serviced lots a positive effect.

Spillovers in Wage Determination in U.S. Manufacturing Industries

HE main objective of this paper is to suggest an econometric technique for identifying and testing the existence and structure of the spillover effects in the wage determination process. The main notion underlying the socalled spillovers hypothesis is that the wage settlements achieved by the ill' industry's bargaining units reflect not only the traditional labor and product market forces affecting the it' industry but also the wage settlements achieved by the jth industry's bargaining units. The terminology used to describe this process has varied considerably-pattern wage-adjustment, key-bargains, spillovers, imitation and dynamic market-interdependence.1 The research strategy underlying this paper is to decompose the wage changes into two components -a deterministic component that can be explained in terms of exogenous labor and product market forces, industry specific or economy-wide, and a residual component. Does this residual wage component stand for purely random effects or does it represent some spillover effects? One can study the covariance structure of the residual wage vector to make inferences about the dynamic interdependence in wage movements between different industries. The plan of the paper is as follows: In section I a brief review of the literature is presented. In section II the underlying theoretical model is explained and the estimates of the empirical model are presented. In section III some simulation experiments of the spillover structure are presented. In section IV the conclusions and policy implications are discussed. 1. Literature Review