Changes in the Czech wage structure: Does immigration matter?

Using the Albrecht et al. (2003) version of the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition technique along the wage distribution, we find that immigrant workers do not affect changes in the Czech wage structure between 2002 and 2006 despite their substantial inflows. Instead, changes in the wage structure are explained solely by increasing returns of native workers, while changes in the observed characteristics of native workers, particularly a rising level of education, are responsible for increasing wage dispersion. The sizeable inflows of foreign workers in the sample years are concentrated among young workers with primary and tertiary education and are primarily due to rising labour demand. The negative immigrant-native wage gaps are persistent along the wage distribution and are explained mainly by differences in observed characteristics. We provide evidence on increasing returns to education of native workers along the wage distribution. The returns are higher in 2006 than in 2002, in line with the evidence in the previous literature. JEL Classification: J31, J21immigration, matched employer-employee data, quantile regression, wage gap decomposition, Wage Structure

The determination of wages of newly hired employees: survey evidence on internal versus external factors

This paper uses information from a rich firm-level survey on wage and price-setting procedures, in around 15,000 firms in 15 European Union countries, to investigate the relative importance of internal versus external factors in the setting of wages of newly hired workers. The evidence suggests that external labour market conditions are less important than internal pay structures in determining hiring pay, with internal pay structures binding even more often when there is labour market slack. When explaining their choice firms allude to fairness considerations and the need to prevent a potential negative impact on effort. Despite the lower importance of external factors in all countries there is significant cross-country variation in this respect. Cross-country differences are found to depend on institutional factors (bargaining structures); countries in which collective agreements are more prevalent and collective agreement coverage is higher report to a greater extent internal pay structures as the main determinant of hiring pay. Within-country differences are found to depend on firm and workforce characteristics; there is a strong association between the use of external factors in hiring pay, on the one hand, and skills (positive) and tenure (negative) on the other. JEL Classification: J31, J41business cycle, employee turnover, internal pay structure, newly hired workers, survey data, wage rigidity

Micro-based evidence of EU competitiveness: The CompNet Database. National Bank of Belgium Working Paper No. 253, March 2014

Drawing from confidential firm-level balance sheets in 11 European countries, the paper presents a novel sectoral database of comparable productivity indicators built by members of the Competitiveness Research Network (CompNet) using a newly developed research infrastructure. Beyond aggregate information available from industry statistics of Eurostat or EU KLEMS, the paper provides information on the distribution of firms across several dimensions related to competitiveness, e.g. productivity and size. The database comprises so far 11 countries, with information for 58 sectors over the period 1995-2011. The paper documents the development of the new research infrastructure, the construction of the database, and shows some preliminary results. Among them, it shows that there is large heterogeneity in terms of firm productivity or size within narrowly defined industries in all countries. Productivity, and above all, size distribution are very skewed across countries, with a thick left-tail of low productive firms. Moreover, firms at both ends of the distribution show very different dynamics in terms of productivity and unit labour costs. Within-sector heterogeneity and productivity dispersion are positively correlated to aggregate productivity given the possibility of reallocating resources from less to more productive firms. To this extent, we show how allocative efficiency varies across countries, and more interestingly, over different periods of time. Finally, we apply the new database to illustrate the importance of productivity dispersion to explain aggregate trade results

Changes in the Czech wage structure:Does immigration matter?

Using the Albrecht et al. (2003) version of the Machado and Mata (2005) decomposition technique along the wage distribution, writers find that immigrant workers do not affect changes in the Czech wage structure between 2002 and 2006 despite their substantial inflows. Instead, changes in the wage structure are explained solely by increasing returns of native workers, while changes in the observed characteristics of native workers, particularly a rising level of education, are responsible for increasing wage dispersion

Unemployment and inactivity traps in the Czech republic:incentive effects of policies

Writers of this study investigate to what extent high net replacement rates between non-work and work household income may distort work incentives. Using a microsimulation model, they find that net replacement rates are articularly high for households with a working partner and children

Labour Force Participation and Tax-Benefit Systems:A Cross-Country Comparative Perspective

This paper investigates the extent to which cross-country differences in aggregate participation rates can be explained by divergence in tax-benefit systems. We take the example of two countries, the Czech Republic and Hungary, which – despite a lot of similarities – differ markedly in labour force participation rates. We first replicate for Czech household-level data the labour supply estimation for Hungary presented in Benczúr et al. (2014) and use the two perfectly comparable estimates to simulate how the aggregate participation rate would change in one country if the other country’s tax and social welfare system were adopted. Our estimation results yield similar labour supply elasticities for both countries, suggesting that individual preferences are essentially identical. The simulation results show that about one-half of the total difference in the participation rates of the 15–74 years old population can be explained by differences in the tax-benefit systems. The highest response is obtained for married women or women of childbearing age. This is related to the more generous maternity benefit system in place in Hungary as compared to the Czech Republic

The impact of capital measurement error correction on firm-level production function estimation

Based on a large panel of Czech manufacturing firms, writers estimate firm-level production functions in 2003–2007 using the Levinsohn and Petrin (2003) and Wooldridge (2009) approaches, correcting for the measurement error in capital. They show that measurement error plays a significant role in the size of the estimated capital coefficient

Structural and cyclical unemployment:What can we derive from the matching function?

This work explains movements in the UV space, i.e. the relationship between stocks of unemployment and vacancies known as the Beveridge curve, in the Czech Republic during 1995–2004. While the Beveridge curve is described by labour market stocks, the work explains shifts in the Beveridge curve using gross labour market flows by estimating the matching function

Microfoundations of the Wage Inflation in the Czech republic

The study investigates whether microfoundations might increase the predictive power of macroeconomic models of wage inflation. By comparing past predictions to observed values, the study finds that the Phillips curve with the average unemployment rate in districts with prevalently low unemployment rates delivers more accurate predictions of aggregated wage inflation than the Phillips curve with the overall unemployment rate