Daniel le Maire

Wage Dispersion and Decentralization of Wage Bargaining

This article studies how decentralization of wage bargaining from sector to firm level influences wage levels and wage dispersion. We use detailed panel data covering a period of decentralization in the Danish labor market. The decentralization process provides variation in the individual worker’s wage-setting system that facilitates identification of the effects of decentralization. We find a wage premium associated with firm-level bargaining relative to sector-level bargaining and that the return to skills is higher under the more decentralized wage-setting systems. Using quantile regression, we also find that wages are more dispersed under firm-level bargaining compared to more centralized wage-setting systems.

Does Peacetime Military Service Affect Crime

Draft lottery data combined with Danish longitudinal administrative records show that military service can reduce criminal activity for youth offenders who enter service at ages 19-22. For this group property crime is reduced for up to five years from the beginning of service, and the effect is therefore not only a result of incapacitation while enrolled. We find no effect of service on violent crimes. We also find no effect of military service on educational attainment and unemployment, but we find negative effects of service on earnings. These results suggest that military service does not upgrade productive human capital directly, but rather impacts criminal activity through other channels, for example by changing the attitudes to criminal activity for this group.

Coordination Frictions and Job Heterogeneity

We develop a competing auction model of a labor market with a continuum of heterogeneous workers and firms. We estimate this model and compare it to closely related models of price posting using Danish data on wages and productivities. Assuming heterogeneous workers with no comparative advantage, we find that each model gives a reasonable approximation of the statistical moments of both the wage and productivity distribution. A sensitivity analysis then draws out further implications of the theory. We explain how the feasible matchings between workers and firms changes as the worker moves up the job ladder, how the identification of assortative matching is fundamentally different in directed and undirected search models, how our theory accounts for business cycle facts related to inter-temporal changes in job offer distributions, and how our model could also be used to identify the contributions of specific versus general human capital.