Are there asymmetries in the effects of training on the conditional male wage distribution?

Recent studies have used quantile regression (QR) techniques to estimate the impact of education on the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. In our paper we investigate the degree to which work-related training – another important form of human capital – affects the location, scale and shape of the conditional wage distribution. Using the first six waves of the European Community Household Panel, we utilise both ordinary least squares and QR techniques to estimate associations between work-related training and wages for private sector men in ten European Union countries. Our results show that, for the majority of countries, there is a fairly uniform association between training and hourly wages across the conditional wage distribution. However, there are considerable differences across countries in mean associations between training and wages

Imputation Rules to Improve the Education Variable in the IAB Employment Subsample

The education variable in the IAB employment subsample has two shortcomings: missing values and inconsistencies with the reporting rule. We propose several deductive imputation procedures to improve the variable. They mainly use the multiple education information available in the data because the employees' education is reported at least once a year. We compare the improved data from the different procedures and the original data in typical applications in labor economics: educational composition of employment, wage inequality, and wage regression. We find, that correcting the education variable: (i) shows the educational attainment of the male labor force to be higher than measured with the original data, (ii) gives different values for some measures of wage inequality, and (iii) does not change the estimates in wage regressions much

Changes in union membership over time : a panel analysis for West Germany

Despite the apparent stability of the wage bargaining institutions in West Germany, aggregate union membership has been declining dramatically since the early 90's. However, aggregate gross membership numbers do not distinguish by employment status and it is impossible to disaggregate these sufficiently. This paper uses four waves of the German Socioeconomic Panel in 1985, 1989, 1993, and 1998 to perform a panel analysis of net union membership among employees. We estimate a correlated random effects probit model suggested in Chamberlain (1984) to take proper account of individual specfic effects. Our results suggest that at the individual level the propensity to be a union member has not changed considerably over time. Thus, the aggregate decline in membership is due to composition effects. We also use the estimates to predict net union density at the industry level based on the IAB employment subsample for the time period 1985 to 1997. JEL - Klassifikation: J

Beyond the mean gender wage gap : decomposition of differences in wage distributions using quantile regression

Using linked employer-employee data, this study measures and decomposes the differences in the earnings distribution between male and female employees in Germany. I extend the traditional decomposition to disentangle the effect of human capital characteristics and the effect of firm characteristics in explaining the gender wage gap. Furthermore, I implement the decomposition across the whole wage distribution with the method proposed by Machado and Mata (2005). Thereby, I take into account the dependence between the human capital endowment of individuals and workplace characteristics. The selection of women into less successful and productive firms explains a sizeable part of the gap. This selection is more pronounced in the lower part of the wage distribution than in the upper tail. In addition, women also benefit from the success of firms by rent-sharing to a lesser extent than their male colleagues. This is the source of the largest part of the pay gap. Gender differences in human capital endowment as well s differences in returns to human capital are less responsible for the wage differential

Wage effects of works councils and opening clauses: the German case

"German employment relations are characterized by a distinct dual system. First, working conditions and wages are determined by industry-level collective bargaining agreements. Second, on the establishment-level, the works council is responsible for employer - employee negotiations. However, since the mid-1980s, an increasing number of areas of regulation have been transferred from the industry- to the establishment-level using so-called opening clauses. The analysis in this article relies on rich German establishment data and reveals new insights into the institutional machinery of wage bargaining. While the existence of such clauses is related to higher wages, their application results in wage cuts of roughly the same size. The results also suggest that works councils, on average, are able to prevent the negative wage effects of opening clauses." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en)

Fitting censored quantile regression by variable neighborhood search

Quantile regression is an increasingly important topic in statistical analysis. However, fitting censored quantile regression is hard to solve numerically because the objective function to be minimized is not convex nor concave in regressors. Performance of standard methods is not satisfactory, particularly if a high degree of censoring is present. The usual approach is to simplify (linearize) estimator function, and to show theoretically that such approximation converges to optimal values. In this paper, we suggest a new approach, to solve optimization problem (nonlinear, nonconvex, and nondifferentiable) directly. Our method is based on variable neighborhood search approach, a recent successful technique for solving global optimization problems. The presented results indicate that our method can improve quality of censored quantizing regressors estimator considerably