Inter-Industry Wage Differentials in EU Countries: What Do Cross-Country Time Varying Data Add to the Picture?

By P. D. Caju, Gábor Kátay, Ana E. Lamo, Daphne Nicolitsas, S. Poelhekke. Social Science Research Network, 2010

172 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper documents the existence of inter-industry wage differentials across a large number of industries for eight EU countries (Belgium, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain) at two different points in time (in general, 1995 and 2002). It then looks into possible explanations for the main patterns observed. The analysis uses the European Structure of Earnings Survey (SES), an internationally-harmonised matched employer-employee dataset, to estimate inter-industry wage differentials conditional on a rich set of employee, employer and job characteristics. After investigating the possibility that unobservable employee characteristics lie behind the conditional wage differentials, a hypothesis which cannot be accepted, the paper considers the role of institutional features, as well as industry structure and performance in explaining inter-industry wage differentials. The results suggest that inter-industry wage differentials are consistent with rent-sharing mechanisms and that rent-sharing is more likely in industries with firm-level collective agreements and with higher collective agreement coverage.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Public Administration

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c88c8948cb85e21da649cf3a1c878c07a3c0631e

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Citations in the corpus

Inter-industry Wage Differentials: How Much Does Rent Sharing Matter? (2009, unknown): “If we compare these results with those of Du Caju et al. (2008) and Rycx et al. (2008) for several European countries on the basis of the 2002 European Structure of Earnings Survey (ESES), we find that the sectoral wage structure reported for Belgium is quite similar to that observed in other…”
The Impact of Training on Productivity and Wages: Firm-Level Evidence (2015, background): “Using the estimates of Du Caju et al. (2010) for interindustry wage premiums in Belgium, we find that the average (median) gap between the productivity and wage premiums is equal to 0.063 (0.050) in sectors for which the interindustry wage premium is positive, while the average (median) gap is…”