Total Wage Research Articles

A Standard Study of the Impact of Total Productivity and Inflation on Nominal Wages during the Period (1985-2020)

This study aimed to analyze a relationship between total productivity and inflation and nominal wages during the period 1985-2020 Through a standard study by applying an autoregressive model(ARDL) Where we divided this research into two parts, a theoretical aspect to study the role of total productivity, and inflation in determining wages , An applied aspect of a Standard Study of the impact of each on the nominal wages in the Algerian economic sector. The results showed the existence of a co-integration relationship in the long run between total productivity, inflation rate and nominal wages through the Bounds test, It also showed an estimate in thelong run on the existence of a positive relationship between the total productivity of the economic sector, the rate of inflation and nominal wages

Digital Rural Construction and Farmers’ Income Growth: Theoretical Mechanism and Micro Experience Based on Data from China

This study analyzes the effect of digital rural construction on farmers’ income growth and the underlying mechanism using a 2SLS instrumental variable approach based on the county digital village index developed by Peking University and AliResearch, as well as micro-survey data of farmers in China. After fully correcting for endogeneity and verifying the robustness of the models, we found that digital rural construction has a significant positive impact on farmers’ total household income, wage income, and property income, while also inhibiting the growth of net agricultural income. Furthermore, we found that digital rural construction increases farmers’ income mainly by promoting non-agricultural employment and asset transformation. In terms of heterogeneity analysis, digital rural construction has a greater effect on increasing farmers’ income with high physical and human capital, but it is not beneficial to farmers with moderate social capital. It also has a greater effect on increasing farmers’ income in villages with better infrastructure. In addition, digital rural construction more significantly increases farmers’ income in the eastern, central, and southern regions of China compared with the western and northern regions. These findings provide new empirical evidence of the effect of digital rural construction on farmers’ income growth in China and other developing countries.

Employment and Wage Consequences of Flexible Wage Components

I document new facts about the relationship between flexible wage components and firm performance using a unique matched employer-employee database from Hungary. Firms providing flexible wage components adjust total wage compensation more to revenue shocks than firms without flexible wages. Nevertheless, employment responses to revenue shocks are the same at firms with and without flexible wage components. These findings also hold in the case of aggregate shocks and during the Great Recession. The results suggest that flexible wage components in their current magnitude do not attenuate employment responses to a negative revenue shock. Finally, I discuss the possible explanations for the empirical findings.

Can information and communication technologies boost rural households’ income and narrow the rural income disparity in China?

Using panel data from National Rural Fixed Point Survey and a supplementary survey about rural ICT projects, this paper empirically analyzes the impact of ICTs on rural households’ income and income disparity in China. The results show that ICTs promotes the growth of total income and wage income of rural households, and has an inhibitory effect on agricultural income, but this inhibitory effect gradually disappears in the process of rural ICT development. The positive effect of ICTs on rural households’ total income is enduring. The heterogeneous analysis further indicates that the income-increasing effect of ICTs is more pronounced for higher-income and higher-educated farmers, which exacerbates the income disparity in rural areas.

1314O Cost-effectiveness of molecularly matched off-label therapies for end-stage cancer: The MetAction precision medicine study

Precision cancer medicine (PCM), the expensive and often modestly efficacious off-label treatment with medications matched to the tumour genome of end-stage cancer, challenges the healthcare resources. We compared health effects, costs and cost-effectiveness of our MetAction PCM study with corresponding data from comparator populations given best supportive care (BSC) in two external randomised controlled trials. We designed three partitioned survival models to evaluate the healthcare costs and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) as the main outcomes. Cost-effectiveness was calculated as the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of PCM relative to BSC with an annual willingness-to-pay (WTP) threshold of EUR 56,384 (NOK 605,000). One-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses addressed uncertainty. We estimated total healthcare costs (relating to next-generation sequencing (NGS) equipment and personnel wages, molecularly matched medications to the patients with an actionable tumour target and follow-up of the responding patients) and the health outcomes for the MetAction patients versus costs (relating to estimated hospital admission) and outcomes for the BSC cases. The ICERs for incremental QALYs were twice or more as high as the WTP threshold and relatively insensitive to cost decrease of the NGS procedures, while reduction of medication prices would contribute significantly towards a cost-effective PCM strategy. Our health economic modelling compared patients with end-stage cancer analysed by NGS for the opportunity to provide molecularly matched therapies, with comparator populations instead receiving BSC, and showed that the high ICERs of PCM were driven by costs relating to the NGS diagnostics and molecularly matched medications, with a likelihood for the strategy to be cost-effective defying WTP constraints. Reducing drug expenses to half the list price would likely result in an ICER at the WTP threshold, which can be an incentive to a public-private partnership of sharing the costs of molecularly matched medicines in PCM, exemplified by the models used in the ongoing IMPRESS-Norway and Dutch DRUP trials.

Optimizations of a Multi-Agent System for a Real-World Warehouse Problem

In recent years, many warehouses applied mobile robots to move products from one location to another. We focus on a traditional warehouse where agents are humans, and they are engaged with tasks to navigate to the next destination one after the other. The possible destinations are determined at the beginning of the daily shift. Our real-world warehouse client asked us to minimize the total wage cost, and to minimize the irritation of the workers because of conflicts in their tasks. We define a heuristic for the optimizations for splitting the orders into warehouse carts, defining the sequence of the products within the carts, and the assignment of the carts to workers. We extend Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) solution techniques. Furthermore, we have implemented our proposal in a simulation software, and we have run several experiments. According to the experiments, the make-span and the wage cost cannot be reduced with the heuristic optimization, however the heuristic optimization considerably reduces the irritation of the workers. We conclude our work with a guideline for the warehouse.

Cost-effectiveness of molecularly matched off-label therapies for end-stage cancer – the MetAction precision medicine study

Background Precision cancer medicine (PCM), frequently used for the expensive and often modestly efficacious off-label treatment with medications matched to the tumour genome of end-stage cancer, challenges healthcare resources. We compared the health effects, costs and cost-effectiveness of our MetAction PCM study with corresponding data from comparator populations given best supportive care (BSC) in two external randomised controlled trials. Methods We designed three partitioned survival models to evaluate the healthcare costs and quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) as the main outcomes. Cost-effectiveness was calculated as the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) of PCM relative to BSC with an annual willingness-to-pay (WTP) threshold of EUR 56,384 (NOK 605,000). One-way and probabilistic sensitivity analyses addressed uncertainty. Results We estimated total healthcare costs (relating to next-generation sequencing (NGS) equipment and personnel wages, molecularly matched medications to the patients with an actionable tumour target and follow-up of the responding patients) and the health outcomes for the MetAction patients versus costs (relating to estimated hospital admission) and outcomes for the BSC cases. The ICERs for incremental QALYs were twice or more as high as the WTP threshold and relatively insensitive to cost decrease of the NGS procedures, while reduction of medication prices would contribute significantly towards a cost-effective PCM strategy. Conclusions The models suggested that the high ICERs of PCM were driven by costs of the NGS diagnostics and molecularly matched medications, with a likelihood for the strategy to be cost-effective defying WTP constraints. Reducing drug expenses to half the list price would likely result in an ICER at the WTP threshold. This can be an incentive for a public-private partnership for sharing drug costs in PCM, exemplified by ongoing European initiatives. ClinicalTrials.gov, identifier NCT02142036

Are payroll tax cuts absorbed by insiders? Evidence from the Swedish retail industry

ABSTRACT Payroll tax cuts are considered inefficient for increasing employment among outsiders because insiders will use their power to bargain for higher wages at the expense of outsiders’ possibility of becoming employed. The extent to which insiders or outsiders reap the rewards of payroll tax cuts is a matter of debate, and previous literature has largely focused on the employment effects of outsiders. Using wage statistics of employees in the Swedish retail sector, we investigate the effects of a youth payroll tax cut in 2007 on insiders’ wage earnings and the number of hours worked. In line with earlier studies, the results show that the payroll tax cut increased insiders’ total wage earnings. However, only 21% of the increase in wage earnings resulted from higher bargained wages. 57% of the wage increase corresponds to a higher intensive margin of employment, and the rest was attributed to the number of hours worked by insiders with a higher hourly wage rate. Thus, there is little to suggest that insiders can absorb large amounts of payroll tax cuts in the form of higher bargained wages, even when a small number of workers hold the most bargaining power.

The institutional wage adjustment to import competition: evidence from the Italian collective bargaining system

Abstract A growing body of research has contributed to understanding the labour market and political effects of globalization. This article explores an overlooked feature of trade-induced adjustments in the labour market: the institutional aspect. We take advantage of the Italian collectively bargained minimum wage system, which is based on a two-tier structure, whereby the first tier entails setting minimum wages at the national contract level. Using an instrumental variable strategy and exploiting variations in contract-level exposure to trade, we find for the 1995–2003 period that, on average, the surge in imports decreased contractual minimum wages by 1.5%. This impact increases in the share of unskilled workers employed in the contract. This negative institutional effect contrasts with a non-significant effect of trade on total wages, with the latter becoming positive and large only for highly skilled workers.

Assessing employment benefits from trade: US-Mexico trade under NAFTA

Recent tendencies in the operation of Global Value Chains (GVC) have indicated an increasingly asymmetric distribution of benefits in terms of the participating countries and different layers of workers. This paper employs the World Input–Output Database to calculate the working hours and wages embodied in manufacturing exports between the US and Mexico, by country of origin and skill level, from 1995 to 2008. In purchasing power, the increase in total wages paid in the US, generated by the bilateral trade, was significantly higher than that of wages paid in Mexico, even though the additional number of hours worked in Mexico was seven times higher. For the US, the results ratify the loss of jobs after 2001, but with an upgrade of the skill structure. We conclude that the trend towards replacement of low-skilled labour by more capital-intensive systems occurs within GVC to the detriment of the incomes of low-skilled workers.

Coping with the consequences of short-term illness shocks: The role of intra-household labor substitution.

In developing countries where medical infrastructure, service delivery systems, and the markets for health insurance are underdeveloped, one important mechanism to cope with the consequences of health shocks is the intra-household substitution of labor. This paper studies the impact of short-term illness shocks on labor supply and wage earnings of prime-aged individuals using data from agricultural households in India. It also documents the compensating intra-household labor supply responses of other non-ill members of the household. We find that an illness shock reduces an individual's monthly wage earnings by 7.1% via the decline in the individual's days of employment in the labor market. Further, an illness shock to the household head causes a compensating increase in the wage labor supply of the wife. An illness shock to the wife, however, induces the household head to devote more time to domestic activities. The compensating labor supply responses are only partially able to insure the loss in total wage income of the household. Our results indicate that the gender-based specialization of labor weakens in the event of an illness shock.

Monetary policy and the racial wage gap

This paper aims to clarify the relationship between monetary policy shocks and wage inequality. We emphasize the relevance of within- and between-wage-group inequalities in explaining total wage inequality in the USA. Relying on the quarterly data for the period 2000–2020, our analysis shows that racial disparities explain 12% of observed total wage inequality. Subsequently, we examine the role of monetary policy in wage inequality. We do not find compelling evidence that shows that monetary policy plays a role in exacerbating the racial wage gap. However, there is evidence that accommodative monetary policy plays a role in magnifying between-group wage inequalities but the impact occurs after 2008.

Attitudes and personality in the Australian gender wage gap

ABSTRACT This paper estimates the effects of gender role attitudes and personality traits on the gender wage gap in Australia. Applying standard decomposition techniques and controlling for a wide range of variables, the paper finds that at least 67.8% of the total gender wage gap of 17.4% in 2019 remains unexplained – a figure which is lower than previous years. The results establish gender role attitudes as a key predictor of this pay gap both in the explained and unexplained part of the wage decomposition. It also shows that the impact of personality traits depends on whether the big five traits or the sub-traits are used in the analysis. Even some of the sub-traits belonging to the same category can influence the gender pay gap in opposite directions. Overall, the estimates establish the importance of psychological variables as more important than traditional human capital and other work-related characteristics in explaining the remaining gender wage gap in Australia.

Urbanization favors high wage earners

As cities increase in size, total wages grow superlinearly, meaning that average wages are higher in larger cities. This phenomenon, known as the urban wage premium, supports the notion that urbanization and the growth of cities contribute positively to human well-being. However, it remains unclear how the distribution of wages changes as cities grow. Here we segment the populations of U.S. cities into wage deciles and determine the scaling coefficient of each decile’s aggregate wages versus city size. We find that, while total wages of all deciles grow superlinearly with city size, the effect is uneven, with total wages of the highest wage earners growing faster than all other deciles. We show that this corresponds with the predominance of high-wage jobs in larger cities. Thus, the effects of urbanization are mixed -- it is associated with higher average wages but with increasing inequality, thus inhibiting prospects for long-term sustainability.

Pay for performance schemes and manufacturing worker productivity: Evidence from a kinked design in China

This paper examines workers’ response to a nonlinear payment system with a penalty and a reward design in a manufacturing firm in China. Using bunching methods, our estimates show that about 31% of workers make decisions with errors, and the structural elasticity of output response to the piece rate is 0.28. The focal nonlinear payment scheme generates 4% output gains compared with a linear payment scheme given the same total wage costs. Further decomposition analysis shows that the reward aspect of the nonlinear scheme mainly contributes to total output gains. Counterfactual analyses show that total output generated by the nonlinear payment system falls with the reduced worker heterogeneity. Our results illustrate the role of worker heterogeneity in designing compensation schemes and provide new insights into the increasing adoption of nonlinear payment systems in modern manufacturing production.

Union membership density and wages: The role of worker, firm, and job-title heterogeneity

We examine the association between union density and wages in Portugal where just 10 percent of all workers are union members but nine-tenths of them are covered by collective agreements. Using a unique dataset on workers, firms, and collective bargaining agreements, we examine the union density wage gap in total monthly wages and its sources – namely, worker, firm, and job-title or ‘occupational’ heterogeneity – using the Gelbach decomposition. The most important source of the mark-up associated with union density is the firm fixed effect, reflecting the differing wage policies of more and less unionized workplaces, which explains two-thirds of the wage gap. Next in importance is the job-title fixed effect, capturing occupational heterogeneity across industries. It makes up one-third of the gap, the inference being that the unobserved skills of workers contribute at most only trivially to the union density wage gap. In a separate analysis based on disaggregations of the total wage, it is also found that employers can in part offset the impact of the bargaining power of unions on wages through firm-specific wage arrangements in the form of the wage cushion. Finally, union density is shown to be associated with a modest reduction in wage inequality as the union density wage gap is highest among low-wage workers. This result is driven by the job-title fixed effect, low-wage workers benefiting more from being placed in higher paying ‘occupations.’

An impact of minimum wage rising on firm-specific factors: The case of the emerging economy

This study examines how the minimum wage raises in Indonesia affect firm-specific factors such as sales growth, return on assets, return on equity, net profit margin, and gross profit margin. The samples used in this study were 135 companies for 12 years’ financial statements ranging from 2008 to 2019, with 1620 observations. An ordinary least square and multivariate analysis of variance are employed. The MANOVA result shows differences in firms specific factors among industries’ types. Meanwhile, sales growth and wage growth showed no difference in the value of sales growth and wage growth between industry types. The regression results show that 1) minimum wage has a positive effect on wage growth, but the non-significant effect on sales growth; 2) economic growth has a negative but non-significant effect on sales growth and wage growth, and 3) only total assets and wage growth variables have a positive and significant effect on gross profit margin. Bodnár et al. (2018) asserted that the negative effect of an increase in minimum wage could be lowered by cutting in non-labor costs, rising in product prices, and improving productivity; however, this study found that the increase in the minimum wage does not spur employees to be more productive because the number of companies that get positive sales growth decreases in the declining economic conditions (Acar, Bossavie, & Makovec, 2019; Luca & Luca, 2019; Che Ahmat, Kim, & Arendt, 2021; Alexandre, Bação, Cerejeira, Costa, & Portela, 2022) in which it might increase the firms’ exit rate

Wage Inequality between Men and Women in Côte D’Ivoire: An Oaxaca-Blinder Decomposition Method

The purpose of this study is to analyze the wage gap between men and women in Côte d’Ivoire. More specifically, it aims to assess the main aspects of gender inequality in the functioning of the labor market in Côte d’Ivoire. The factors underlying the wage gap between men and women are examined empirically using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method. The data used are from the 2016 National Survey on the Situation of Employment and the Informal Sector (ENSESI) among households. The results of the study show that, more 74.16% of the total wage gap remains unexplained by objective factors. In addition, wage inequality varies by socio-demographic characteristics (age, gender, education), employment setting (urban or rural), and by sector and employment status. Finally, the total wage gap is predominantly explained by age, work experience, socio-professional category (senior manager) and form of remuneration.

The dynamics of differentiation of wages among the employees of oil and gas industry during the1950s – 1980s (on the example of the “Tatneft”)

The question of the evolution of industrial motivation is a relatively new area of modern research in economic history. Active research on this topic in Russia began in the 1990s, relying mostly on the sources that characterize social aspects of industrial development of the Russian Empire and Soviet Russia of the 1920s – 1930s. The evolution of industrial motivation at the Soviet enterprises did not receive due attention. This article examines one of the key factors of industrial motivation –differentiation of wages based on the archival and published materials of the large oil and gas company “Tatneft”. The subject of this research is the dynamics of wages among various categories of Tatneft employees over the period from 1950s to 1980s. Research methodology leans on the principles of systematicity and historicism, as well as historical-comparative method and statistical analysis. The novelty lies acquisition of new knowledge on one of the crucial factors of incentivization and motivation of employees, as well as in introduction of new archival sources into the scientific discourse. The author concludes on the tendency towards equalize "net" salaries of different categories of employees of the company; however, the analysis of the dynamics of total wages of Tatneft employees taking into account bonuses, indicates a noticeable discrepancy.

UPAH PEMBUATAN KANDANG PUYUH DALAM TINJAUAN FIQH MUAMALAH (Studi di Jorong Kamboja Nagari Lubuak Jantan)

The main problem in this study is how to pay wages for making cages in Jorong Cambodia, Nagari Lubuk Jantan, North Lintau Buo District, Tanah Datar Regency, and how to review muamalah fiqh on wages for making quail cages in Jorong Cambodia, Nagari Lubuk Jantan, North Lintau Buo District, Tanah Regency. Flat. The purpose of this study was to find out and explain the wages for making quail cages and explain the fiqh muamalah review of wages for making quail cages in Jorong Cambodia, Nagari Lubuk Jantan, North Lintau Buo District. The type of research that the author uses is qualitative research, while the nature of the research is descriptive qualitative. Qualitative descriptive research is to describe phenomena that occur in the field as they are according to reality. Data collection was carried out using interview and documentation techniques. Based on the results of the research that the author did, it was concluded that the implementation of the wage system in the manufacture of quail cages, the owner of the cage asked for the contents of one box of 40 quails, then the total wages of one box was Rp. 120,000,-. If one row of wages Rp. 9,000,000, - then after the cage is ready, the owner fills a box with 50 quails, then the craftsman suffers a loss in one box of Rp. 30.000,-. one row of 75 boxes, the craftsman suffers a loss of Rp. 2.250.000,- in one row of quail cages. The form of aqad carried out by the owner of the cage with the worker who made the cage verbally, this is not in accordance with the agreement because there is an element of gharar which is not allowed because it will cause harm to one party or a mutual agreement and harm the party concerned. Overview of Fiqh Muamalah on wages in making The quail cage that occurred in Jorong Cambodia Nagari Lubuk Jantan was not in accordance with the Fiqh Muamalah concept because there was a loss caused by one of the parties. Islam forbids anything that harms one of the parties to the muamalah, every loss and harm must be eliminated.