Knowledge that Transforms

This article investigates the existence of compensating wage differentials across seasonal and long‐term jobs that arise due to anticipated working time restrictions. Using longitudinal information from the Austrian administrative records, we derive a definition of seasonality based on observed regularities in employment patterns. As wages change across seasonal and long‐term jobs for the same individual over time, we can control for individual‐specific effects and use variation in the starting month of seasonal jobs as an exogenous predictor of anticipated unemployment. We find that employers pay, on average, a positive wage differential of about 11% for seasonal jobs.

We use British panel data to investigate single women’s labor supply changes in response to three reforms that affected individuals’ work incentives. We use these reforms to identify changes in labor supply. There is evidence of small hours of work effects for two of such reforms. A third reform in 1999 instead led to a significant increase in single mothers’ hours of work. The mechanism by which the labor supply adjustments were made occurred largely through job changes rather than hours changes with the same employer. This is little overall effect of the reforms on wages.

We study the relation between workers’ skill dispersion and firm productivity using a unique data set of Italian manufacturing firms with individual records on all their workers. Our measure of skill is the individual worker’s effect from a wage equation. We find that a firm’s productivity is positively related to skill dispersion within occupational status groups (production and nonproduction workers) and negatively related to skill dispersion between these groups. Consistently, most of the overall skill dispersion is within and not between firms. These findings are consistent with some recent hierarchical models of the firms’ organizational structure.