When hiring new entrants into the labor market, firms make their decisions based on limited<br />information about worker ability. An estimation of ability must be gleaned from observable factors such as a worker\'s education level, GPA and interview performance. While some firms conduct further testing, it remains that an accurate evaluation of worker ability at the time of hiring is very difficult to achieve. Evidence suggests that much of a firm\'s evaluation of worker ability takes place after a worker has been hired. The purpose of this paper is to provide a thorough analysis of wage growth and a firm\'s ability to observe its workers\' productivity.<br /><br />I regress a Mincerian wage equation using data from the March 2009 Supplement of the Consumer Population Survey merged with additional industry data gathered from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The coefficient of worker experience interacted with various measures of worker observability is used to provide an indication of the importance of worker observability in the growth of wages. I examine four potential measures of worker observability: firm size, occupation, industry, and worker-manager ratio. The results indicate a positive relationship between worker observability and wage growth when using firm size as a measure of observability. / Ph. D.

Thesis advisor: Shannon Seitz / Issues pertaining to low income workers are of the upmost interest to policy makers. In the mid 1990s, the issue of welfare recipients and work was at the forefront of public policy, as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 was passed. One of the many goals of the policy was to "end the dependence of needy families on government benefits" by encouraging work and ultimately higher wages. The first paper of my dissertation explores the processes by which work leads to wage growth for welfare recipients. I find that welfare recipients have similar returns to tenure and experience as non-recipients and that tenure has higher returns than experience for these women. Because of this, policies that discourage leaving work, like a work requirement, are more effective encouraging wage growth than policies discouraging welfare use, like a time-limit. A decade later, the low savings rates of low income workers has led policy makers within the Obama administration to consider making Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) available to all workers. The second paper of this dissertation examines how likely low individual workers are to participate in these plans. We find that low-income workers not currently offered voluntary retirement savings plans are less likely to participate than those currently offered those plans. The paper indicates policy makers should be wary of basing estimates of participation in the offered IRAs on current participation, as this may overestimate the participation rate by up to 25 percent. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2010. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

<P> The three essays in this thesis conduct empirical research on the economics of immigration using data from the Canadian Censuses. In the first paper, I analyze the impact of immigration on native-born Canadians' wage growth by combining an area approach and a skill approach. The estimated effects of immigration from both a first difference regression and a two-stage regression are either statistically insignificant or significantly positive. The results indicate that there is no evidence for a negative impact of the large immigrant influx during the 1990s on the wage growth of natives. The second essay examines the impact of residence in an ethnic enclave on male immigrants' labour force activities. For recent immigrants who arrived in Canada within ten years, the intensity of enclave residence is found to be negatively associated with their labour force participation rate, but positively correlated with their employment probability. However, living in an enclave has no significant effect on the labour force activity of old immigrants whose years-since-migration is more than twenty. These findings are robust to probit and instrumental variable estimations. In the third essay, I examine the returns to education for first, second and third generation immigrant men. Multivariate regression results indicate that the third generation with at least postsecondary education earn more than the equally educated first and second generations. However, the third generation do not have a wage premium over the second generation when they have high school education and lower. I explain the well-educated second generation's difficulty in translating their intellectual ability into productivity by their ethnic and linguistic distance from the Canadian mainstream, and by negative city-specific effects. I then suggest that immigrant assimilation policies that target the well-educated first and second generations should be designed to promote the acceptance of their human capital by the Canadian labour market. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation consists of three essays in applied microeconomics. The first and third essays are in the area of empirical labor economics while the second essay utilizes laboratory experiments to study labor market issues. The first essay investigates the effects of social ability on the earnings of employees. Using a microeconomic model in a two-firm setting, the effects of social ability on a worker's earnings are calculated and shown to be increasing with higher social ability levels. The results show that the more social workers, when compared to the less social workers, end up working a lower number of hours but at a higher hourly wage rate. Because of these offsetting effects, social ability had no net effect on annual earnings. The second essay of the dissertation addresses the same issue by using experimental methods. In the constructed experimental design, subjects are randomly selected and assigned to one of two groups, where the second group is the "control" group. A significant relationship is found between how much subjects earned and the ratings they get from their group members for the social group. The highest earnings of the social group are significantly higher than the earnings of the control group. When subjects are assumed to behave rationally, those in the group which spends more time together earn significantly more than those in the control group. The third essay of this dissertation analyzes the findings of Lazear about raiding, seniority within a firm, and job search during time not worked. Using the NLSY-79, a raiding dummy is included in the classical wage equation to better understand its effects. Seniority within a firm and search while unemployed are also included in the wage equation. Earnings of those who are not raided and stay with the same firm are also compared to those who are raided and switch firms. In both cases, statistically significant results are found confirming the theoretical findings of Lazear. Raiding is associated with higher earnings and staying with the same firm does yield lower earnings. Unemployed search is also examined, and the results support Lazear's statement that search while unemployed yields to lower earnings.

<p>Diss. (sammanfattning) Umeå : Umeå universitet, 1998</p> / digitalisering@umu

From establishing government in 1949, Communist Party of China had pursuing a socialist system. However, over-emphasis on equal distribution lead to the individual income and the individual performance are not proportional, so that the mainland China was under the circumstances of "usually used in negative two half kilogram," and was near to the border of collapse. After Deng Xiaoping came back to power, threw away the past ideology of equal distribution, and he changed the economic system. China's economy began to advance by leaps and bounds. Nowadays, the mainland China¡¦s eco-nomic potentiality has surpassed Japan and it becomes the second economy which is only inferior to the U.S. economy. However, in so dazzling economic performance of mainland China's, the achievement of economic growth is not generally reflected in the labor standards on wages, The wages of workers in China still ranked among the last level of the world's wage classes. However, the average wage in the low social workers, the Gini coefficient is close to the bottom line of social tolerance. That is, how to set up wage growth mechanism, straighten out the relationship between income distribution has became a top priority of mainland authorities. This pay for performance system for the mainland legal system are based on the mainland of the State Council "pay for per-formance on the compulsory school system guidance," analysis to explore the subject, to be addressed. This paper is divided into seven chapters around: Chapter 1 Introduction, describes the study of this motivation, purpose, scope, methods, limits, and proposed research framework. Chapter 2 is to explore the mainland of the basic principles of pay for per-formance system, Chapter 3 of the mainland of the administrative organization of pay for performance system. Chapter 4 is to explore the mainland China of pay for perfor-mance system administrative privileges. Chapter 5and Chapter 6,are respectively to ex-plore the mainland China of performance pay system and monitoring of relief, and in Chapter 7 are conclusions and recommendations of pay for performance system

To explain the gender wage growth gap, sociologists tend to focus on gender segregation among/within jobs whereas economists put emphasis on individual job mobility. This study adopted a concept combining both segregation and mobility. The concept helps to take the gender segregation before and after job mobility into account to strictly measure the mechanisms of wage growth. For analysis, this study used 6-year personnel data of a firm, which allows researchers to track employees’ job mobility, wages, and job information at the most accurate level. The concept of combining segregation and mobility was operated through the gender composition of jobs and employee job change, which generated ten patterns. Among them, the following six were focused: staying in male or female jobs, movement between male or female jobs, and movement toward male or female jobs. While controlling wages at prior jobs, the multilevel model analysis shows that the wage growth rates in the six mobility patterns were stratified as follows: mobility between male jobs, stay in male jobs, mobility toward male jobs, mobility toward female jobs, mobility between female jobs, and stay in female jobs. This hierarchy system in the organization reveals two features: first, men’s job-related mobility or stay compensated more steeply than women’s job-related mobility or stay. Second, within each gender category of jobs, the mobility provided higher wage growth than stay. In sum, the gender category of jobs proceeded job mobility in terms of wage growth. Interestingly, when paying attention to the higher wage growth of ‘mobility toward female jobs’ than ‘mobility between female jobs’, this implies that the former occurred in movement from lower-level male jobs to higher-level female jobs, particularly higher than female jobs involved in the latter mobility. In view of gender regarding job mobility patterns, women and men typically did not experience differentiated salary growth. The categories of job mobility used in this paper provide a new and integrated insight for scholars who study gender segregation and job mobility, especially in view of an organization.