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The purpose of this paper is to estimate the impact of industry and occupation skills on the wages of displaced workers due to firm closure.

Using linked employer-employee data on displaced workers, this paper estimates the impact of industry and occupation tenure on post-displacement wage changes correcting for endogeneity with a multinomial logit model.

The evidence suggests that occupation has more specific skill requirements than industry. Displaced workers moving both industry and occupation suffer a higher wage decline than those changing only industry or occupation. Furthermore, the transferability of skills varies across occupations and industries; more specifically, intermediate-level occupations are more demanding in specific skills and impose higher wages losses for displaced workers. Finally, the economic crisis reduced the return on firm-specific skills only in some cases.

The examination of skill specificity/transferability helps firms, workers and policy makers to draw strategies and policies to improve their individual situation and social welfare. The analysis suggest that when experienced workers are displaced and forced to find a job in a different industry, they suffer considerable wage cuts. While displacement imposes costs to workers and society, different choices impact wages differently.

To the authors’ best knowledge, this is the first paper studying the simultaneous impact of industry and occupation tenure on wages using displaced workers due to firm closing. The paper also corrects for the selection of different alternatives after the displacement and uses data from a country characterised by low-job flows and low-worker flows. Finally, the impact of economic crises on return to skills is assessed.

Extant research has shown the positive effects of value congruence on individual attitudes, behaviors and performance. However, very few studies have been conducted to examine the difference in the relationship between value congruence and attitudinal outcomes across people of different attributes. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the relationships between employee-organization value congruence and job attitudes vary across different occupational groups, with the focus on different levels of nurses. The study provides evidence to organizations to adopt better approaches to harness the benefit from employees’ spontaneous work motivation.

Nursing homes provide a unique research context because of the different nursing occupations with varying degree of identifying characteristics including educational attainment, skill level, income and decision-making power. The present study thus examines how the relationships between nurses-home value congruence and nurses’ job attitudes vary across different nursing occupations, instrumented by a survey of nursing staff of nursing homes in a Midwestern state in the USA.

Consistent with prior research, value congruence is found positively associated with nurses’ job satisfaction and organizational commitment, but negatively with turnover intention. Consistent with the “diminishing marginal effect” argument, the relationships between value congruence and job satisfaction and organizational commitment are found more pronounced among nurses of lower occupational level.

The extant literature does not explicitly compare the effect of within-occupation value congruence on various attitudinal and behavioral outcomes across different occupations. As values have individual and social foundations, in a specific workplace context, it is impractical, if not impossible, to gain a comprehensive view of employees’ value profile and work-related consequences without looking further into the differences across types of employee. Although without sufficient existing literature to compare to, the present study does provide consistent results with theoretical predictions, and display a relatively clear picture of how the relationships between value congruence and job attitudes are unwrapped along the occupational dimension.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which differences in the subject of degree studied by male and female university graduates contributes to the gender pay gap in Greece, an EU country with historically large gender discrepancies in earnings and occupational segregation. In addition, the paper explores the reasons underlying the distinct educational choices of men and women, with particular emphasis on the role of wage uncertainty.

Using micro‐data from the Greek Labour Force Survey (LFS), Oaxaca‐Blinder decompositions are employed to detect the extent to which gender differences in the type of degree studied can explain the male‐female pay gap. “Risk‐augmented earnings functions” are also used to examine the differential wage premiums offered to men and women in Greece in response to the uncertainty associated with different fields of study.

It is found that the subjects in which women are relatively over‐represented (e.g. Education, Humanities) are also those with the lowest wage returns. Gender differences in the type of degree studied can therefore explain an additional 8.4 per cent of the male‐female pay gap in Greece. A potential reason for distinct gender educational choices is that women opt for less uncertain educations that consequently command lower wage premiums in the job market.

The findings suggest that the promotion of gender equality in Greece should pay closer attention to removing informal barriers to entry for women in educational fields traditionally chosen by men (e.g. more effective careers advice, work‐experience placements, matching of young girls with professional “mentors”).

The paper is the first to investigate the contribution of individual's field of study to the gender wage gap in Greece. In addition, it includes the first‐ever estimations of “risk‐augmented earnings equations” for that country.

Uses longitudinal data from the NLSY79 to examine the effect of a broad variety of performance‐based pay schemes and fringe benefits on male and female wages between 1988 and 1998. Specifically, analyzes whether the offer of various performance‐based pay schemes and fringe benefits functions as an alternative work incentive, eliciting greater effort and raising wages or, instead, it is accompanied by lower wages, as predicted by compensating wage theory. The results indicate that, while most performance‐based pay schemes are associated with higher wages to differing extents across gender, tips are commonly accompanied by lower wages among men. Similarly, while the offer of a retirement plan appears to as a work incentive raising male and female wages, workers are willing to trade wages for jobs offering life and medical insurance.

This study asks whether working in a R&D intensive industry affects a worker's wage profile. If R&D investment translates into transferable human capital or knowledge, workers' mobility constitutes a negative externality from the point of view of the firm/industry that bears the cost of R&D activities. A steepening of the wage profile would address such externality.

Using PSID data combined with US BEA data on US manufacturing industries' R&D intensities between 1981 and 1992, regression analysis is used to explore the hypothesis that, similarly to general training, industry R&D steepens a worker's wage‐experience profile.

In general the evidence is mixed. The results obtained from biennial wage growth regressions support to some extent the hypothesis that exposure to R&D activities allows a specific group of workers to accumulate general human capital for which they pay a positive price in early stages of their career.

An important caveat applies to the results. Unlike previous research by Møen who uses firm level R&D, the results found in this study are generated by using industry level R&D, which, being possibly affected by severe measurement errors, may bias the estimated coefficients towards zero.

This study complements Møen's evidence based on Norwegian wages with the effects of industry‐specific R&D intensities on the earnings profile in US manufacturing industries. By investigating whether industry R&D affects the return to experience and/or to tenure this study addresses an overlooked issue of which type of skills R&D allows workers to accumulate.

This paper is the first to present empirical evidence consistent with models of signaling through unemployment and to uncover a new stylized fact using the 1988–2006 Displaced Worker Supplement (DWS) of the Current Population Survey (CPS), namely that, among white-collar workers, post-displacement earnings fall less rapidly with unemployment spells for layoffs than for plant closings. Because high-productivity workers are more likely to be recalled than low-productivity ones, they may choose to signal their productivity though unemployment, in which case the duration of unemployment may be positively related to post-displacement wages. Identification is done using workers whose plant closed as they cannot be recalled, and no incentives to signal arise.

This paper investigates the links between statistical discrimination, mobility, tenure, and wage profiles in the early career of workers. The model assumes that female workers’ productivity is noisier and that the noise/signal ratio tapers off more rapidly for male workers. These two assumptions yield numerous theoretical predictions pertaining to gender wage gaps. These predictions are tested using data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. As predicted, we find that men and women have the same wage at the start of their career, but that female wages grow at a slower rate thus generating a gender wage gap.

Studies wage dispersion across firms and time in a specific industry that exhibits competitive features – the Portuguese clothing industry in the 1991‐1994 period. By drawing on a large matched employer‐employee panel, obtains the following results: the workers' firm affiliation plays an important role in wage determination; there is a sizeable and persistent dispersion of firm‐fixed effects, which is also similar for workers of different tenure levels and occupations; workers in high‐turnover firms are generally paid less. It is believed that these findings are not consistent with a simple competitive labour market model.