Wages, Welfare Benefits and Migration

Differences in economic opportunities give rise to strong migration incentives, across regions within countries, and across countries. In this paper we focus on responses to differences in welfare benefits across States. We apply the model developed in Kennan and Walker (2008), which emphasizes that migration decisions are often reversed, and that many alternative locations must be considered. We model individual decisions to migrate as a job search problem. A worker starts the life-cycle in some home location and must determine the optimal sequence of moves before settling down. The model is sparsely parameterized. We estimate the model using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979). Our main finding is that income differences do help explain the migration decisions of young welfare-eligible women, but large differences in benefit levels provide surprisingly weak migration incentives.     

Wages,fringe benefits and worker turnover

Linked employer–employee data from Norway are utilised to study how employers use wages and fringe benefits in managing their workforce. The analysis shows that on average across all establishments, we observe a positive correlation between wages and fringe benefits. This indicates the presence of labour market frictions and thus is not supportive of the classical frictionless hedonic wage model. Higher wages and more fringe benefits reduce the worker turnover rate. Fringe benefits have stronger negative impact on the excess worker turnover rate than indicated by the reported monetary value.     

Low Pay,Higher Pay and Job Satisfaction in Wales

Abstract

Using the first six waves of the Welsh boosts to the British Household Panel Survey this paper attempts to explain the determinants of overall job satisfaction and four facets of job satisfaction in Wales, distinguishing between female and male workers and low-paid and higher paid workers. The motivation of the paper is the claim made widely in the EU that low-paid jobs are jobs of inherently low quality, in which case we should expect that job satisfaction would be lower in low-paid jobs. Since there are proportionately more low-paid workers in Wales than in either England or Scotland we would also expect to find that job satisfaction would be lower in Wales than in the other two countries.     

Unequal Pay,Unequal Responses? Pay Referents and their Implications for Pay Level Satisfaction

Pay referents are those with whom workers make pay comparisons. The five referents used in this study are: market, organizational, financial, social and historical. Of particular interest is the importance attached to each of these referents and the implications of inequity (under and over) for pay level satisfaction. The study also examines reactions to pay inequity on the basis of union status. The data for the study derive from a survey of 2867 public sector research workers. The study finds that the market referent is the most important to all workers, irrespective of union status; type of inequity (over or under) with this referent has the greatest impact on pay level satisfaction. The paper concludes with an examination of the implications for management, unions and the design of pay systems.     

Wages,non-wage characteristics,and predominantly male jobs

This paper estimates the wage premium associated with working in predominantly male jobs. It also examines whether this wage premium is greater than the compensation workers demand for the less desirable non-wage characteristics of such jobs. The coefficients of the change in the proportion of men in an occupation on the change in wages for quits and layoffs provide opposing biased estimates of the wage premium; because workers who voluntarily quit move to better matches, but those that are laid off accept jobs from the representative distribution of job offers. Specifically, when the premium paid over- (under-)compensates for undesirable work characteristics, the quit estimate is a downward (upward) biased estimate of the wage premium, while the layoff estimate is biased upward (downward). Results from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) and the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) indicate that: (1) the estimated bounds of the wage premium are large; and (2) the wage premium overcompensates for the non-wage characteristics of male jobs.     

Prices and Wages

Inflationary pressures cooled over the latter months of 2013, with CPI inflation finally moving back to the 2% target for the first time in four years in December. The slowdown in inflation was largely a function of base effects; big rises in food prices in the autumn of 2012 were not repeated last year and increases in domestic energy bills, while still very large, were also lower than in the previous year. In addition, the impact of higher university tuition fees was smaller in 2013 than in 2012, which also helped to slow inflation a little…     

The Outlook for Wages

Price inflation is on the way down The most dramatic evidence of this is the fall in retail price inflation as the VAT effect comes out of the index. But as the Charts overleaf show, there are clear signs of a fall in inflation rates in wholesale output prices and, more strikingly still, in manufacturers' input prices.
This may be good news for consumers, but so far any reduction in inflation has been chiefly at the expense of profit margins as price rises have fallen below the increase in wage costs. The question for the immediate future is whether the fall in price inflation will now lead to a fall in wage inflation     

Wages,Prices and Politics: Evidence from Norway

This paper studies the empirical relevance of the close ties between a central trade union and the social democratic political party using time series data for Norway. Using a structural wage-price model we estimate that changing from a bourgeois to a social democratic government reduces manufacturing wages in the long run by 2.3 percent. This result is consistent with a wage bargaining model augmented by political preferences of the union leaders. Private service wages are not directly affected by government type, but wage spillover effects imply that the long-run dampening effect in the private service sector is around 2 percent. The results also support the proposition of the Scandinavian model of inflation that the traded goods sector is the wage leader.     

劳动力工资水平标准探讨

劳动力工资水平作为关乎国计民生的重大问题,一直受到政府部门和社会各界的高度关注。文章采用理论分析与实证研究相结合的研究方法,利用专业的计量经济学软件Eviews,分析出与劳动力工资水平密切相关的宏观因素。     

Wages Councils Destroy Jobs

Failure to understand the price mechanism has produced tragic social policies: rent restriction has deprived students and others of furnished rooms; the 'free' NHS has depressed expenditure on medical care. And sociologist Professor Marsland argues that minimum wages make the poor poorer.     

Wages,work intensity and unemployment in Japan,UK and USA

This paper focuses on the impact of excess labour supply on wage inflation in Japan, the US and the UK. Excess labour supply is not simply measured as officially registered unemployed persons but includes a measure of excess supply within the firm, i.e. work intensity. The empirical analysis confirms the importance of broadening the unemployment definition. Interesting differences arise in the cross-country comparison. Our key conclusions are that work intensity is an important factor in determining wage inflation, and that results based on recorded unemployment rates alone seriously underestimate the flexibility of real wages.     

High Wages Cause Unemployment

The lessons of history are presented by Kent Matthews in his argument that inter-war unemployment is not explained by Keynesian 'stickiness' of money wages but by the classical theory of excessively high real wages underpinned by the rise in the real value of national insurance benefits.     

Doctors' Pay: Market, not state

Distortions of employment in the health care market can be laid squarely at the door of government. Professor Dennison (right), formerly Vice-Chancellor of the University of Hull, reveals why even an imperfect market is preferable to a state monopoly.     

Industry Mix, Wages, and the Divergence of County Income in Pennsylvania

Per capita incomes have diverged across Pennsylvania counties. County incomes may differ because of differences in industrial structures and because of differences in earnings within industries; a county may have a below-average income because its industry mix is comprised of low paying jobs or because county jobs pay low wages compared to the same jobs in other counties. A procedure developed by Hanna (1951) is utilized to separate income differences into these two components by constructing two counterfactual incomes for each county. The handful of high-income counties in Pennsylvania have favorable wages while the counties with incomes below the state average, although with employment mixes comparable to the overall state mix, tend to have workers who receive low wages relative to the state industry average. Wages are low in the relatively poor counties due to less investment in physical and human capital.     

Wages,employment, labour turnover and the accessibility of local labour markets

In this paper, we extend a dynamic efficiency wage model to the case of multiple local labour markets that interact through migration. Firms are concerned about turnover costs. The quitting behaviour of workers is a function of local labour market conditions, non-wage income and the costs and benefits of migration to other local labour markets. A synthetic micro sample of 20,302 observations from the 1986, 1991 and 1996 New Zealand Censuses of Population and Dwellings provides evidence supporting the theory. Across subgroups, the wages of workers with relatively inelastic local labour supply and/or lower geographical mobility are relatively more responsive to changes in the local employment rate. The evidence is consistent with the notion that local employers engage in monopsonistic competition with respect to the employment of such workers.