International audienceMost applications of Nash bargaining over wages ignore between-employer competition for labor services and attribute all of the workers' rent to their bargaining power. In this paper, we write and estimate an equilibrium model with strategic wage bargaining and on-the-job search and use it to take another look at the determinants of wages in France. There are three essential determinants of wages in our model: productivity, competition between employers resulting from on-the-job search, and the workers' bargaining power. We find that between-firm competition matters a lot in the determination of wages, because it is quantitatively more important than wage bargaining à la Nash in raising wages above the workers' "reservation wages," defined as out-of-work income. In particular, we detect no significant bargaining power for intermediate- and low-skilled workers, and a modestly positive bargaining power for high-skilled workers

We construct and estimate an equilibrium search model with on-the-job-search. Firms make take-it-or-leave-it wage offers to workers conditional on their characteristics and they can respond to the outside job offers received by their employees. Unobserved worker productive heterogeneity is introduced in the form of cross-worker differences in a "competence" parameter. On the other side of the market, Þrms also are heterogeneous with respect to their marginal productivity of labor. The model delivers a theory of steady-state wage dispersion driven by heterogenous worker abilities and Þrm productivities, as well as by matching frictions. The structural model is estimated using matched employer and employee French panel data. The exogenous distributions of worker and Þrm heterogeneity components are non parametrically estimated. We use this structural estimation to provide a decomposition of cross-employee wage variance. We Þnd that the share of the cross-sectional wage variance that is explained by person effects varies across skill groups. SpeciÞcally, this share lies close to 40% for high-skilled white collars, and quickly decreases to 0% as the observed skill level decreases. The contribution of market imperfections to wage dispersion is typically around 50%.

The Advanced GAmma Tracking Array (AGATA) is a European project to develop and operate the next generation γ-ray spectrometer. AGATA is based on the technique of γ-ray energy tracking in electrically segmented high-purity germanium crystals. This technique requires the accurate determination of the energy, time and position of every interaction as a γ ray deposits its energy within the detector volume. Reconstruction of the full interaction path results in a detector with very high efficiency and excellent spectral response. The realisation of γ-ray tracking and AGATA is a result of many technical advances. These include the development of encapsulated highly segmented germanium detectors assembled in a triple cluster detector cryostat, an electronics system with fast digital sampling and a data acquisition system to process the data at a high rate. The full characterisation of the crystals was measured and compared with detector-response simulations. This enabled pulse-shape analysis algorithms, to extract energy, time and position, to be employed. In addition, tracking algorithms for event reconstruction were developed. The first phase of AGATA is now complete and operational in its first physics campaign. In the future AGATA will be moved between laboratories in Europe and operated in a series of campaigns to take advantage of the different beams and facilities available to maximise its science output. The paper reviews all the achievements made in the AGATA project including all the necessary infrastructure to operate and support the spectrometer

It is often argued that informal labor markets in developing countries promote growth by reducing the impact of regulation. On the other hand informality may reduce the amount of social protection offered to workers. We extend the wage-posting framework of Burdett and Mortensen (1998) to allow heterogeneous firms to decide whether to locate in the formal or the informal sector, as well as set wages. Workers engage in both off the job and on the job search. We estimate the model using Brazilian micro data and evaluate the labor market and welfare effects of policies towards informality.

This paper considers tests for the rank of a matrix for which a root-T consistent estimator is available. However, in contrast to tests associated with the minimum chi-square and asymptotic least squares principles, the estimator's asymptotic variance matrix is not required to be either full or of known rank. Test statistics based on certain estimated characteristic roots are proposed whose limiting distributions are a weighted sum of independent chi-squared variables. These weights may be simply estimated, yielding convenient estimators for the limiting distributions of the proposed statistics. A sequential testing procedure is presented that yields a consistent estimator for the rank of a matrix. A simulation experiment is conducted comparing the characteristic root statistics advocated in this paper with statistics based on the Wald and asymptotic least squares principles.