Joanne Lindley

The Rising Postgraduate Wage Premium

Despite post‐college degree holders now making up nearly 15% of the US adult workforce, studies of their labour market performance remain sparse. This is surprising given that they are the most educated group in the labour force and as, over time, they have done significantly better than all other education groups. We show a significant rise over time in the postgraduate wage premium, reflecting an increased relative demand due to their superior skill sets and occupational status. The increase in the demand for postgraduates is a key factor behind rising wage inequality within the increasingly heterogeneous college graduate workforce.

Finance Sector Wage Growth and the role of Human Capital.

Given the UK finance sector is one of the largest in the world, it provides the perfect setting for a study into the nature of the finance sector wage premium. We reveal the pervasiveness of this premium, across all sub-sectors of finance, and across all occupations within finance, and with the very highest rewards going to 40-49 year old men working in London. Moreover, the UK premium has continued to rise despite the recent financial crisis. Consequently, this study uses rich data from the UK to investigate potential explanations. We find that the financial sector is more skill intensive but also that financial sector workers have higher childhood test scores vis-a-vis non-finance workers. So we investigate to what extent these higher qualifications and higher cognitive skills can explain the financial pay differential. We then go on to consider whether the financial premium is a consequence of differences in job characteristics and thus whether technological change can explain the growth in the premium. While each of these factors has some role to play, we find that none can fully explain the wage premium found in the financial sector, which we find to be pervasive across 17 OECD countries, including the US. We therefore attribute to this to rent-sharing.

Are There Unexplained Financial Rewards for the Snakes in Suits? A Labour Market Analysis of the Dark Triad of Personality

The Big Five personality test is used to generate psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism scores using a large UK individual level micro dataset. These scores show that high levels of narcissism and Machiavellianism can be associated with a higher incidence of employment in managerial occupations, while high levels of psychopathy are related to higher employment in the other services sector. The article finds a wage premium to Machiavellianism that is largest at the 90th percentile, over and above all productivity‐related explanations. The average hourly wage increase for a one‐point move up the Machiavellianism scale is around 2.1 per cent.