Daniel Drezner has an interesting item in the Washington Post about the Obama administration's new overtime rules. (The salary threshold will increase from $455 per week to $913 per week in December, so more workers will be entitled to overtime pay if they work more than 40 hours a week.)

Drezner notes that the new rules will affect non-profits (see also this post about how universities could be affected). Drezner worries

that some think tanks might respond to this rule by hiring fewer paid assistants and offering more unpaid internships instead. A few talented research assistants might thrive under these new rules, but the real winners would be those undergraduates, postgraduates and graduate students who can afford such unpaid internships as a way to get their foot into the door of the Ideas Industry.

(There's a similar effect with minimum wage increases. As we wrote last year in a special report on the minimum wage, "Increased minimum wages drive some with some college education to internships, but the less educated to unemployment.")

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal has a pair of stories on paid leave and state preemption of wage and benefit laws. They note that lower paid workers receive paid leave benefits at a lower rate than higher paid workers. As we wrote earlier this year, you have to consider the total employee compensation package. It is a mix of wages, benefits, and working conditions. It could very well be the case that many workers (at whatever compensation level) who do not get paid leave actually prefer to have wages make up a higher proportion of their compensation mix. People value the various pieces of compensation differently.

Along those lines, a recent paper found that "part of the gender gap in earnings . . . is a compensating differential in which women are willing to give up higher earnings to obtain other job attributes." Specifically:

. . . on average students are willing to give up 2.8% of annual earnings for a job with a percentage point lower probability of job dismissal. . . . Individuals, on average, are willing to give up 5.1% of their salary to have a job which offers the option of working part-time hours rather than a job which does not offer this option. When dividing our sample by gender, we find that women have a higher average preference for workplace hours flexibility, with an implied willingness-to-pay of 7.3% compared to 1% for men. Women also have a higher WTP for more secure jobs- they are willing to give up 4% of their salary for a percentage point lower probability of job dismissal (versus a 0.6% WTP for males). On the other hand, men have a higher WTP for jobs with higher earnings growth: they are willing to give up 3.4% of annual earnings for a job with a percentage point higher earnings growth (the corresponding estimate for women is a statistically insignificant 0.6%).

The paper also includes this quote from Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations:

The five following are the principal circumstances which, so far as I have been able to observe, make up for a small pecuniary gain in some employments, and counterbalance a great one in others: first, the agreeableness or disagreeableness of the employments themselves; secondly, the easiness and cheapness, or the difficulty and expense of learning them; thirdly, the constancy or inconstancy of employment in them; fourthly, the small or great trust which must be reposed in those who exercise them; and, fifthly, the probability or improbability of success in them.

We discussed many of these topics in a report this year, By Mandating A Specific Compensation Mix, Labor Policies Take Flexibility Out of the Equation. The report includes a look at scheduling, an issue Mary wrote about yesterday. (And see also this post.)