I develop a stylized partial on-the-job equilibrium search model that incorporates a spatial dimension. Workers reside on a circle and can move at a cost. Each point on the circle has a wage distribution. Implications about wages and job mobility are drawn from the model and tested on Danish matched employer–employee data. The model predictions hold true. I find that workers working farther away from their residence earn higher wages. When a worker is making a job-to-job transition where he/she changes workplace location he/she experiences a higher wage change than a worker making a job-to-job transition without changing workplace location. However, workers making a job-to-job transition that makes the workplace location closer to the residence experience a wage drop. Furthermore, low-wage workers and workers with high transportation costs are more likely to make job-to-job transitions, but also residential moves.

We extend the Dolado et al. (1994) model to both inflows and outflows of migrants and assume that they have a human capital endowment that contributes to increase/decrease the stock of human capital in the receiving/sending economy. We derive the conditional convergence equation in which the impact of migration flows on the growth rate is disentangled in a pure quantity effect and in a quality or composition effect of immigration and emigration rates that accounts for the relative human capital endowment of migrants with respect to resident population. Next, we test the model with Italian regional data for the 1970–2005 time period. We find that the model provides a good explanation of the Italian experience. The quantity effect is negative for the immigration rate and positive for the emigration rate, whereas the composition effect is positive for immigration and negative for emigration. Finally, we separate the centre-north from the south and find that the composition effect of emigration is stronger for the latter. We interpret these results as a clear evidence of a brain drain from the Mezzogiorno to the centre-northern regions.

We estimate the union effect on wages in Chile to be between 18 and 24 per cent. We follow a two-stage procedure that allows us to correct the endogeneity of union status and to separate true from spurious dependence, by exploiting the union history of individuals using panel data. We find evidence of comparative-advantage sorting in union status, strong true state dependence and a re-distributional effect of union membership (i.e. wage gains from unionization are larger for lower-wage earners).

In the empirical literature on minimum wage enforcement, the standard approach is to measure the number of violations, not their depth. In this paper we present a family of violation indices that, by analogy with poverty indices, can emphasize the depth of violation to different degrees. The standard measure is a special case of this family of indices, but other members of the family highlight the depth of violation. We present an application to South Africa to show that the depth of violation matters, and is not captured by the standard measure in actual situations.

In this paper we present two statistical approaches for discussing and modelling job satisfaction based on data collected in the Survey on Household Income and Wealth (SHIW) conducted by the Bank of Italy. In particular, we analyse these data by means of a mixture model introduced for ordinal data and compare results with the Ordinal Probit model. The aim is to establish common outcomes and differences in the estimated patterns of global job satisfaction, but also to stress the potential for curbing the effects of measurement errors on estimates by using CUB models [a Combination of discrete Uniform and (shifted) Binomial distributions], allowing control for the effect of uncertainty and shelter choices in the response process.

Using the China Household Income Project (CHIP) data for 1995 and 2002, we examine the returns to education in China, separating out credential effects from pure years-of-schooling effects. The results are broadly consistent with the implications of China moving towards a market-oriented economy: increasing returns to education where both years of schooling and credentials from completing key phases are rewarded; a decline in the importance of credentials as firms have more discretion to select the best-suited employees irrespective of their credentials; more emphasis on credentials in the state sector; less emphasis on credentials for long-tenured employees for whom the employer has more opportunity to assess productivity without relying on credentials; and a greater importance of credentials for females for whom the value of such signals may be more important.