Categorical Distinctions and Claims-Making: Opportunity, Agency, and Returns from Wage Negotiations

In this article, we examine wage negotiations as a specific instance of claims-making, predicting that the capacity to make a claim is first a function of the position, rather than the person, and that lower-status actors—women, migrants, fixed-term, part-time, and unskilled workers—are all more likely to be in positions where negotiation is not possible. At the same time, subordinate-status actors may be less likely to make claims even where negotiation is possible, and when they do make wage claims they may receive lower or no returns to negotiation. Analyses of wage negotiations by more than 2,400 German employees largely confirm these theoretical expectations, although the patterns of opportunity, agency, and economic returns vary by categorical status. All low-status actors are more likely to be in jobs where negotiation is not possible. Women, people in lower-class jobs, and people with temporary contracts are less likely to negotiate even when given the opportunity. Regarding returns, agency in wage claims does not seem to improve the wages of women, migrants, or working-class individuals. The advice to “lean-in” will not substantially lower wage inequalities for everyone, although men who lean in do benefit relative to men who do not.

Work-Care Balance over the Day and the Gender Wage Gap

We focus on the timing of labor supplied during the day and its interaction with home care responsibilities. Using the American Time Use Survey, we measure the incidence of household care activities between 8 AM and 5 PM (the prime time of the day). Women experience more work interruptions during that time. These work interruptions imply wages that are about 9 percent lower. This result is consistent with occupations offering more flexibility but also a lower wage. We offer suggestive evidence that missing work due to household demands has a larger penalty in occupations with more coordinated work schedules.

Wage Insurance and Labor Market Trajectories

Wage insurance provides income support to displaced workers who find reemployment at a lower wage. We study the effects of the wage insurance provisions of the US Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program using administrative data from the state of Virginia. The program includes an age-based eligibility cutoff, allowing us to compare earnings and employment trajectories for workers whose ages at the time of displacement make them eligible or ineligible for the program. Our findings suggest that wage insurance eligibility increases short-run employment probabilities and that wage insurance and TAA training may yield similar long-run effects on employment and earnings.

Unintended Consequences of Unemployment Insurance Benefits: The Role of Banks

We use disaggregated U.S. data and a border discontinuity design to show that more generous unemployment insurance (UI) policies lower bank deposits. We test several channels that could explain this decline and find evidence consistent with households lowering their precautionary savings. Since deposits are the largest and most stable source of funding for banks, the decrease in deposits affects bank lending. Banks that raise deposits in states with generous UI policies squeeze their small business lending. Furthermore, counties that are served by these banks experience a higher unemployment rate and lower wage growth.

Gender differences in wage expectations: the role of biased beliefs

We analyze gender differences in expected starting salaries along the wage expectations distribution of prospective university students in Germany, using elicited beliefs about both own salaries and salaries for average other students in the same field. Unconditional and conditional quantile regressions show 5–15% lower wage expectations for females. At all percentiles considered, the gender gap is more pronounced in the distribution of expected own salary than in the distribution of wages expected for average other students. Decomposition results show that biased beliefs about the own earnings potential relative to others and about average salaries play a major role in explaining the gender gap in wage expectations for oneself.

Firm-Specific Worker Incentives, Employee Retention, and Wage–Tenure Slopes

Strategy scholars have long studied the strategic implications of firm-specific human capital but have almost completely ignored their conceptual dual: firm-specific worker incentives. This paper proposes that firm-level incentives can also vary in firm specificity, and accordingly, firm-specific incentives may help to explain advantages independent of the firm specificity of human capital. Results from a proprietary data set, including data from 284 software development firms and matched employee-level compensation data for 8,208 software developers in 99 of those firms, suggest that firms with higher firm specificity in their incentive bundles may have lower dysfunctional employee turnover rates as well as lower wage–tenure slopes. In other words, these firms may lose fewer employees who they would prefer to keep and may be able to do so while still offering lower wage increases over time than their competitors in the labor market. Thus, firm-specific incentives may provide a viable alternative pathway to human capital–based competitive advantages.

The impact of collective bargaining on employment and wage inequality: Evidence from a new taxonomy of bargaining systems

To study the link between different types of collective bargaining systems and employment, unemployment and wage inequality, I use a novel taxonomy of bargaining systems in 36 OECD countries between 1980 and 2015. The results show that coordinated bargaining systems are associated with higher employment, better integration of vulnerable groups and lower wage inequality than fully decentralized systems. Uncoordinated centralized systems perform similarly in terms of unemployment to fully decentralized systems but are associated with higher employment and lower wage inequalities. These results suggest that the link between decentralization and good labour market outcomes is more nuanced than previously suggested.

Who Can Work from Home?

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many states have adopted stay-at-home orders, rendering a large segment of the workforce unable to continue doing their jobs. These policies have distributional consequences, as workers in some occupations may be better able to continue their work from home. I identify the segments of the U.S. workforce that can plausibly work from home by linking occupation data from O*NET to the American Community Survey. I find that lower-wage workers are up to three times less likely to be able to work from home than higher-wage workers. Those with lower levels of education, younger adults, ethnic minorities, and immigrants are also concentrated in occupations that are less likely to be performed from home.

Criza COVID-19: Provocări pentru piața muncii din România

The paper draws attention to the impact of the COVID-19 context on the labor market. Based on the secondary data analysis, a classification of the economic branches regarding the risk of affecting the activity is sketched. The higher risk tends to complement other employment vulnerabilities (lower wage level, higher share of selfemployment). The Romanian protective measures of employment and incomes fit the European practices of the current context. However, there is a risk of not being able to respond adequately to the increase of poverty and inequality. Keywords: labour market inequalities; social policies; COVID-19.