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The institution of tenure has elicited debate and controversy since its introduction in higher education. Proponents argue the need for tenure based on academic freedom and efficient university governance. Critics argue that it represents inefficiency in the higher education labor market and protects less productive faculty members. The use of tenure in academic libraries has been no less controversial, with only 40−60% of academic libraries supporting tenure track positions for academic librarians. This dichotomy in the labor market for academic librarians represents a natural experiment and allows for the testing of the presence of a compensating wage differential for tenure.

This study examines 10 years’ worth of cross-sectional data drawn from member libraries of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). Models examine both the institutional characteristics of tenure-granting ARL academic libraries and the impact of tenure on starting salaries. Issues related to both a union wage premium and a compensating wage differential due to tenure are explored. The results of this research suggest that tenure, while serving other functions within an academic library setting, does not have the predicted impact on starting salaries.

This article tests whether workers are indifferent between risky and safe jobs provided that, in labor market equilibrium, wages should serve as a utility equalizing device. Workers’ preferences are elicited through a partial measure of overall job satisfaction: satisfaction with job-related risk. Given that selectivity turns out to be important, we use selectivity corrected models. Results show that wage differentials do not exclusively compensate workers for being in dangerous jobs. However, as job characteristics are substitutable in workers’ utility, they could feel satisfied, even if they were not fully compensated financially for working in dangerous jobs.

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the importance of individual social capital characteristics in determining wages, both directly through their valuation by employers and indirectly through their impact on individual occupational choice. We find that a person’s level of sociability and care for others works through both channels to explain wage differences between social and nonsocial occupations. Additionally, expected wages in each occupation type are found to be at least as important as a person’s level of social capital in choosing a social occupation. We make use of restricted 2000 Decennial Census and 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey.

Economists and sociologists have proposed arguments for why there can exist wage penalties for work involving helping and caring for others, penalties borne disproportionately by women. Evidence on wage penalties is neither abundant nor compelling. We examine wage differentials associated with caring jobs using multiple years of Current Population Survey (CPS) earnings files matched to O*NET job descriptors that provide continuous measures of “assisting & caring” and “concern” for others across all occupations. This approach differs from prior studies that assume occupations either do or do not require a high level of caring. Cross-section and longitudinal analyses are used to examine wage differences associated with the level of caring, conditioned on worker, location, and job attributes. Wage level estimates suggest substantive caring penalties, particularly among men. Longitudinal estimates based on wage changes among job switchers indicate smaller wage penalties, our preferred estimate being a 2% wage penalty resulting from a one standard deviation increase in our caring index. We find little difference in caring wage gaps across the earnings distribution. Measuring mean levels of caring across the U.S. labor market over nearly thirty years, we find a steady upward trend, but overall changes are small and there is no evidence of convergence between women and men.

Purpose – We analyze segregation between immigrants and natives at the firm level and explore the connection between segregation and wage inequality in Switzerland.

Methodology/Approach – Our approach accounts for the interaction between skill level and immigration status (work permit). First, we calculate exposure rates in order to analyze segregation at the firm level along these two dimensions. Second, we examine the role of segregation in the explanation of wage inequality between different skill–nationality groups. We use data from the Swiss Wage Structure Survey 2002, an employer–employee database that records individual wages among a very large sample of establishments in all industries, covering approximately 42,000 firms and 1 million workers.

Findings – Our results show that interfirm segregation is particularly pronounced for unskilled foreign workers and for recently arrived, highly skilled foreigners. The former earn lower wages than equally skilled Swiss workers, and the latter are paid higher wages than highly skilled Swiss workers. In both cases, interfirm segregation accounts for almost the entire wage differential.

Originality/Value of paper – This paper presents a generalization of the approach used by Groshen (1991) to the multigroup case by defining segregation with respect to the two dimensions of nationality and skill. The use of multigroup exposure rates is common in studies of neighborhood segregation (e.g., Bayer et al., 2004), but our paper shows that they can also be fruitfully applied in the analysis of interfirm segregation and wage inequality.

This study investigates the formal/informal employment earnings gap in Turkey. We focus on the earnings differentials that can be explained by observable characteristics and unobservable time-invariant individual heterogeneity. We first, estimate the standard Mincer earnings equations using ordinary least squares (OLS), controlling for individual, household, and job characteristics. Next we use, panel data and the quantile regression (QR) techniques in order to account for unobserved factors which might affect the earnings and the intrinsic heterogeneity within formal and informal sectors. OLS results confirm the existence of an informal sector penalty almost half of which is explained by observable variables. We find that formal-salaried workers are paid significantly higher than their informal counterparts and of the self-employed confirming the heterogeneity within the informal employment. QR results show that pay differentials are not uniform along the earnings distribution. In contrast to the mainstream literature which views informal self-employment as the upper-tier and wage-employment as the lower-tier, we find that self-employment corresponds to the lower-tier in the Turkish labor market. Finally, fixed effects estimation indicates that unobserved individual characteristics combined with controls for observable characteristics explain the pay differentials between formal and informal employment entirely in the total and the female sample. However, informal sector penalty persists in the male sample.