Wage Dispersion and Team Performance: The Moderation Role of Club Size

Previous research on professional football offer conflicting results regarding the impact of wage dispersion on team performance. However, the existing intra-league heterogeneity among clubs is overlooked and could be the reason for the diverging outcomes. The aim of this paper is to reanalyze this relationship having the clubs’ size as moderator. Payroll – which captures the financial strength – is used as proxy of club size. Ordinary Least Squares regressions with season and league fixed effects are employed. Dispersion is measured by three indexes for robustness check. The outputs confirm the quadratic relationship between wage dispersion and performance, but adding that identical levels of dispersion have different impact on football clubs according to their financial strength.

Changing selection into full-time work and its effect on wage inequality in Germany

To explore whether changes in the selection into full-time work among German men were a driver in the rise in wage inequality since the mid-1990s, we propose a modification of selection-corrected quantile regressions. Addressing Huber and Melly’s (J Appl Econom 30(7):1144–1168, 2015) concerns, this modification allows us to estimate the effects of selection with respect to both observables and unobservables. Our findings show that those employed in 1995 would have had lower wages in 2010 than those employed in 2010 and wage dispersion would have been higher, suggesting that full-time workers have become less heterogeneous over time.

The Network Structure of Occupations: Fragmentation, Differentiation, and Contagion

Occupational structure is commonly viewed as either hierarchical or organized around stable classes. Yet, recent studies have proposed to describe occupational structure as a network, where the mobility of workers demarcates boundaries. Moving beyond boundary detection, this article develops occupational network as a dynamic system in which between-occupation exchange is shaped by occupational similarities, and occupational attributes are in turn responsive to mobility patterns. We illustrate this perspective with the exchange networks of detailed occupations. Our analysis shows that the U.S. occupational structure has become more fragmented. The division was in part associated with the emerging importance of age composition, as well as those of quantitative, creative, and social tasks. The fragmentation reduced wage contagion and therefore contributed to a greater between-occupation wage dispersion. These results indicate that occupational attributes and mobility are co-constitutive, and that a network perspective provides a unifying framework for the study of stratification and mobility.

Skill complementarity in production technology: New empirical evidence and implications

Danish manufacturing firm data reveal that 1) industries differ in within-firm worker skill (= wage) dispersion, and 2) within-firm skill dispersion positively correlates with firm productivity in industries with higher average skill dispersion. We argue that these patterns reflect technological differences between industries: firms in the “skill complementarity” industries profit from hiring similarly able workers, while the “skill substitutability” firms thrive on skill differences. Our study produces a robust, data-driven and theoretically validated classification of industries into the complementarity and substitutability groups, unveils hitherto unnoticed technological heterogeneity between industries within the same economy, and illustrates its importance through simulations.

Wage disparities between high and low wage cities with and without the cost of living within Punjab and Sindh: An application of Oaxaca-Blinder using PSLM with HIES

Wage disparities research hardly incorporate for the cost of living differences due to data restriction, while the wage disparity issue is the crucial area of economist interest. The study aims to examine the wage disparities between high and low wage cities for Punjab and Sindh province of Pakistan with and without the cost of living, deploying the data of Pakistan Social and Living Standards Measurement Survey (PSLM) with Household Integrated Economic Survey (HIES) for 2005, 2007, 2010, and 2013. Applying the Oaxaca-Blinder estimation method, the findings infer that wage dispersion is high without the cost of living model for both provinces (Punjab and Sindh) as compared to with cost of the living model. Moreover, the results reveal that the wage dispersion is greater in Punjab province than Sindh province. For policymakers, our study suggests that the cost of living is an essential component of the wage dispersion in Pakistan’s cities; it should be considered while formulating for wage policy.

What drives wages differentials in Greece: workplaces or workers?

Using a micro-aggregated dataset that contains gross wages as well as employer and employee characteristics, we investigate whether observed wage differentials in Greece reflect mostly the underlying variation in employer characteristics, i.e. the structure of the Greek production, or worker and job characteristics. Our results show that both employer and worker characteristics are important contributors to the observed wage dispersion of full-time private sector jobs in Greece. Occupation and workplace effects alone explain around 52% of the overall wage variation in Greece. An additional 11% is explained by controlling for the impact of workplace-occupation matching. Other observable characteristics of the workers such as age, gender and type of job contract add up to 23.5% more explanatory power. Finally, our results also show that both the observed gender and contract type wage gaps are more prevalent among high-skilled occupations, acting thus as a disincentive to the acquisition of skills.

Robust Estimation of Wage Dispersion with Censored Data: An Application to Occupational Earnings Risk and Risk Attitudes

We present a semiparametric method to estimate group-level dispersion, which is particularly effective in the presence of censored data. We apply this procedure to obtain measures of occupation-specific wage dispersion using top-coded administrative wage data from the German IAB Employment Sample. We then relate these robust measures of earnings risk to the risk attitudes of individuals working in these occupations. We find that willingness to take risk is positively correlated with the wage dispersion of an individual’s occupation.