Suchergebnisse

Using data from the German Socio Economic Panel, I analyze the incidence, financing, and returns to workplace training in Germany for the years 1986 to 1989. Much of this training seems general, and is provided to workers by their employer at no direct cost. While workers typically report larger productivity gains from the training during work hours, such training has lower returns than training undertaken during leisure time. Workers with higher earnings growth seem more likely to participate in training. I deal with this selection problem by estimating models that allow for individual level heterogeneity in earnings growth rates.

Many economists suspect that downward nominal wage rigidities in ongoing labour contracts are an important source of employment fluctuations over the business cycle, but there is little direct empirical evidence on this conjecture. This paper compares three occupations in the housing sector with very different wage setting institutions: real estate agents, architects and construction workers. I study the wage and employment responses of these occupations to the housing cycle, a proxy for labour demand shocks to the industry. The employment of real estate agents, whose pay is far more flexible than the other occupations, indeed reacts less to the cycle than employment in the other occupations, although specific estimates are noisy. I show that the aggregate implications of the estimates depend also on the aggregate labour demand elasticity, which captures how easily laid off workers can find employment in alternative sectors.

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are the result of different investment decisions by firms for the jobs typically held by less-skilled workers. Firms in Europe have more incentives to invest in less-skilled workers, because minimum wages or union contracts mandate that relatively high wages have to be paid to these workers. I report some empirical evidence for investments in training and physical capital across the Atlantic, which is roughly in line with this theoretical reasoning.

Labor market institutions, via their effect on the wage structure, affect the investment decisions of firms in labor markets with frictions. This observation helps explain rising wage inequality in the US, but a relatively stable wage structure in Europe in the 1980s. These different trends are the result of different investment decisions by firms for the jobs typically held by less skilled workers. Firms in Europe have more incentives to invest in less skilled workers, because minimum wages or union contracts mandate that relatively high wages have to be paid to these workers. I report some empirical evidence for investments in training and physical capital across the Atlantic, which is roughly in line with this theoretical reasoning.

Occupational segregation and pay gaps by gender remain large, while many of the constraints traditionally believed to be responsible for these gaps seem to have weakened over time. We explore the possibility that women and men have different tastes for the content of the work that they do. We relate job satisfaction and job mobility to measures that proxy for the content of the work in an occupation, which we label 'people', 'brains' and 'brawn'. The results suggest that women value jobs high on 'people' content and low on 'brawn'. Men care about job content in a similar fashion, but have much weaker preferences. High school students show similar preferences in a discrete choice experiment and indicate that they make their choices based mainly on preferences for the work itself. We argue that the more pronounced preferences of women can account for occupational sorting, which often leads them into careers with large pay penalties for interruptions due to childbearing.