AKM Worker-Firm Fixed Effects

Abstract We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit into four subintervals spanning the period from 1985 to 2009. We show that these models provide a good approximation to the wage structure and can explain nearly all of the dramatic rise in West German wage inequality. Our estimates suggest that the increasing dispersion of West German wages has arisen from a combination of rising heterogeneity between workers, rising dispersion in the wage premiums at different establishments, and increasing assortativeness in the assignment of workers to plants. In contrast, the idiosyncratic job-match component of wage variation is small and stable over time. Decomposing changes in mean wages between different education groups, occupations, and industries, we find that increasing plant-level heterogeneity and rising assortativeness in the assignment of workers to establishments explain a large share of the rise in inequality along all three dimensions.

We propose a framework to identify and estimate earnings distributions and worker composition on matched panel data, allowing for two‐sided worker‐firm unobserved heterogeneity and complementarities in earnings. We introduce two models: a static model that allows for nonlinear interactions between workers and firms, and a dynamic model that allows, in addition, for Markovian earnings dynamics and endogenous mobility. We show that this framework nests a number of structural models of wages and worker mobility. We establish identification in short panels, and develop tractable two‐step estimators where firms are classified in a first step. Applying our method to Swedish administrative data, we find that log‐earnings are approximately additive in worker and firm heterogeneity. Our estimates imply the presence of strong sorting patterns between workers and firms, and a small contribution of firms—net of worker composition—to earnings dispersion. In addition, we document that wages have a direct effect on mobility, and that, beyond their dependence on the current firm, earnings after a job move also depend on the previous employer.

We propose leave‐out estimators of quadratic forms designed for the study of linear models with unrestricted heteroscedasticity. Applications include analysis of variance and tests of linear restrictions in models with many regressors. An approximation algorithm is provided that enables accurate computation of the estimator in very large data sets. We study the large sample properties of our estimator allowing the number of regressors to grow in proportion to the number of observations. Consistency is established in a variety of settings where plug‐in methods and estimators predicated on homoscedasticity exhibit first‐order biases. For quadratic forms of increasing rank, the limiting distribution can be represented by a linear combination of normal and non‐central χ 2 random variables, with normality ensuing under strong identification. Standard error estimators are proposed that enable tests of linear restrictions and the construction of uniformly valid confidence intervals for quadratic forms of interest. We find in Italian social security records that leave‐out estimates of a variance decomposition in a two‐way fixed effects model of wage determination yield substantially different conclusions regarding the relative contribution of workers, firms, and worker‐firm sorting to wage inequality than conventional methods. Monte Carlo exercises corroborate the accuracy of our asymptotic approximations, with clear evidence of non‐normality emerging when worker mobility between blocks of firms is limited.

Most 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 study a longitudinal sample of over one million French workers from more than five hundred thousand employing firms. We decompose real total annual compensation per worker into components related to observable employee characteristics, personal heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity, and residual variation. Except for the residual, all components may be correlated in an arbitrary fashion. At the level of the individual, we find that person effects, especially those not related to observables like education, are a very important source of wage variation in France. Firm effects, while important, are not as important as person effects. At the level of firms, we find that enterprises that hire high-wage workers are more productive but not more profitable. They are also more capital and high-skilled employee intensive. Enterprises that pay higher wages, controlling for person effects, are more productive and more profitable. They are also more capital intensive but are not more high-skilled labor intensive. We find that person effects explain about 90% of inter-industry wage differentials and about 75% of the firm-size wage effect while firm effects explain relatively little of either differential.

Abstract We use a massive, matched employer-employee database for the United States to analyze the contribution of firms to the rise in earnings inequality from 1978 to 2013. We find that one-third of the rise in the variance of (log) earnings occurred within firms, whereas two-thirds of the rise occurred due to a rise in the dispersion of average earnings between firms. However, this rising between-firm variance is not accounted for by the firms themselves but by a widening gap between firms in the composition of their workers. This compositional change can be split into two roughly equal parts: high-wage workers became increasingly likely to work in high-wage firms (i.e., sorting increased), and high-wage workers became increasingly likely to work with each other (i.e., segregation rose). In contrast, we do not find a rise in the variance of firm-specific pay once we control for the worker composition in firms. Finally, we find that two-thirds of the rise in the within-firm variance of earnings occurred within mega (10,000+ employee) firms, which saw a particularly large increase in the variance of earnings compared with smaller firms.

We employ data that match the population of Danish workers to the universe of private-sector Danish firms, with product-level trade flows by origin- and destination-countries. We document new stylized facts about offshoring and instrument for offshoring and exporting. Within job spells, offshoring increases (decreases) the high-skilled ( low-skilled) wage; exporting increases the wages of all skill-types; the net wage-effect of trade varies substantially within the same skill-type; conditional on skill, the wage-effect of offshoring varies across task characteristics. We estimate the overall effects of offshoring on workers' present and future income streams by constructing pre- offshoring-shock worker-cohorts and tracking them over time. (JEL F14, F16, J24, J31, L24)

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, firms 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 firm 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 firm heterogeneity components are nonparametrically estimated. We use this structural estimation to provide a decomposition of cross–employee wage variance. We find that the share of the cross–sectional wage variance that is explained by person effects varies across skill groups. Specifically, 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%.

We quantify the importance of imperfect competition in the US labor market by estimating the size of labor market rents earned by American firms and workers. We construct a matched employer-employee panel dataset by combining the universe of US business and worker tax records for the period 2001–2015. Using this panel data, we identify and estimate an equilibrium model of the labor market with two-sided heterogeneity where workers view firms as imperfect substitutes because of heterogeneous preferences over nonwage job characteristics. The model allows us to draw inference about imperfect competition, worker sorting, compensating differentials, and rent sharing. (JEL D24, H24, H25, J22, J24, J31, J42)

We investigate learning at the workplace. To do so, we use German administrative data that contain information on the entire workforce of a sample of establishments. We document that having more‐highly‐paid coworkers is strongly associated with future wage growth, particularly if those workers earn more. Motivated by this fact, we propose a dynamic theory of a competitive labor market where firms produce using teams of heterogeneous workers that learn from each other. We develop a methodology to structurally estimate knowledge flows using the full‐richness of the German employer‐employee matched data. The methodology builds on the observation that a competitive labor market prices coworker learning. Our quantitative approach imposes minimal restrictions on firms' production functions, can be implemented on a very short panel, and allows for potentially rich and flexible coworker learning functions. In line with our reduced‐form results, learning from coworkers is significant, particularly from more knowledgeable coworkers. We show that between 4 and 9% of total worker compensation is in the form of learning and that inequality in total compensation is significantly lower than inequality in wages.

In this paper, we formulate and estimate a flexible model of job mobility and wages with two‐sided heterogeneity. The analysis extends the finite mixture approach of Bonhomme, Lamadon, and Manresa (2019) and Abowd, McKinney, and Schmutte (2019) to develop a new Classification Expectation‐Maximization algorithm that ensures both worker and firm latent‐type identification using wage and mobility variations in the data. Workers receive job offers in worker‐type segmented labor markets. Offers are accepted according to a logit form that compares the value of the current job with that of the new job. In combination with flexibly estimated layoff and job finding rates, the analysis quantifies the four different sources of sorting: job preferences, segmentation, layoffs, and job finding. Job preferences are identified through job‐to‐job moves in a revealed preference argument. They are in the model structurally independent of the identified job wages, possibly as a reflection of the presence of amenities. We find evidence of a strong pecuniary motive in job preferences. While the correlation between preferences and current job wages is positive, the net present value of the future earnings stream given the current job correlates much more strongly with preferences for it. This is more so for short‐ than long‐tenure workers. In the analysis, we distinguish between type sorting and wage sorting. Type sorting is quantified by means of the mutual information index. Wage sorting is captured through correlation between identified wage types. While layoffs are less important than the other channels, we find all channels to contribute substantially to sorting. As workers age, job arrival processes are the key determinant of wage sorting, whereas the role of job preferences dictate type sorting. Over the life cycle, job preferences intensify, type sorting increases, and pecuniary considerations wane.

This paper develops a new framework for examining the determinants of wage distributions that emphasizes within-industry reallocation, labor market frictions, and differences in workforce composition across firms. More productive firms pay higher wages and exporting increases the wage paid by a firm with a given productivity. The opening of trade enhances wage inequality and can either raise or reduce unemployment. While wage inequality is higher in a trade equilibrium than in autarky, gradual trade liberalization first increases and later decreases inequality.

Rent-sharing by workers can reduce the incentives for investment if some of the returns to sunk capital are captured in higher wages. We propose a simple measure of this "holdup" effect based on the size of the wage offset for firm-specific capital accumulation. Using Social Security earnings records for workers in the Veneto region of Italy linked to detailed financial data for their employers, we find strong evidence of rent-sharing, with an elasticity of wages with respect to potential rents per worker of around 4%, arising mainly at larger firms with higher price-cost margins. On the other hand, we find little evidence that bargaining lowers the return on investment. Instead, firm-level bargaining appears to split the rents after deducting the full cost of capital. Copyright 2014, Oxford University Press.

We develop an equilibrium model of on-the-job search with ex ante heterogeneous workers and firms, aggregate uncertainty, and vacancy creation. The model produces rich dynamics in which the distributions of unemployed workers, vacancies, and worker-firm matches evolve stochastically over time. We prove that the surplus function, which fully characterizes the match value and the mobility decision of workers, does not depend on these distributions. This result means the model is tractable and can be estimated. We illustrate the quantitative implications of the model by fitting to US aggregate labor market data from 1951–2012. The model has rich implications for the cyclical dynamics of the distribution of skills of the unemployed, the distribution of types of vacancies posted, and sorting between heterogeneous workers and firms. (JEL E24, E32, J24, J63, J64)

How does trade liberalization affect wages? This is the first paper to consider in theory and data how the impact of final and intermediate input tariff cuts on workers' wages varies with the global engagement of their firm. Our model predicts that a fall in output tariffs lowers wages at import-competing firms, but boosts wages at exporting firms. Similarly, a fall in input tariffs raises wages at import-using firms relative to those at firms that only source locally. Using highly detailed Indonesian manufacturing census data for the period 1991 to 2000, we find considerable support for the model's predictions.

The effect of coworkers on the learning and the productivity of an individual is measured combining theory and data. The theory is a frictional equilibrium model of the labor market in which production and the accumulation of human capital of an individual are allowed to depend on the human capital of coworkers. The data is a matched employer-employee dataset of US firms and workers. The measured production function is supermodular. The measured human capital function is non-linear: Workers catch-up to more knowledgeable coworkers, but are not dragged-down by less knowledgeable ones. The market equilibrium features a pattern of sorting of coworkers across teams that is inefficiently positive. This inefficiency results in low human capital individuals having too few chances to learn from more knowledgeable coworkers and, in turn, in a stock of human capital and a flow of output that are inefficiently low.

Existing evidence on peer effects in the productivity of coworkers stems from either laboratory experiments or real-world studies referring to a specific firm or occupation. In this paper, we aim at providing more generalizable results by investigating a large local labor market, with a focus on peer effects in wages rather than productivity. Our estimation strategy—which links the average permanent productivity of workers' peers to their wages—circumvents the reflection problem and accounts for endogenous sorting of workers into peer groups and firms. On average over all occupations, and in the type of high-skilled occupations investigated in studies on knowledge spillover, we find only small peer effects in wages. In the type of low-skilled occupations analyzed in extant studies on social pressure, in contrast, we find larger peer effects, about one-half the size of those identified in similar studies on productivity. (JEL J24, J31, J41, M12, M54)

We develop and estimate an equilibrium job search model of worker careers, allowing for human capital accumulation, employer heterogeneity, and individual-level shocks. Wage growth is decomposed into contributions of human capital and job search, within and between jobs. Human capital accumulation is largest for highly educated workers. The contribution from job search to wage growth, both within and between jobs, declines over the first ten years of a career—the “job-shopping” phase of a working life—after which workers settle into high-quality jobs using outside offers to generate gradual wage increases, thus reaping the benefits from competition between employers. (JEL J24, J31, J63, J64)

Individual earnings are higher in bigger cities.We consider three reasons: spatial sorting of initially more productive workers, static advantages from workers' current location, and learning by working in bigger cities. Using rich administrative data for Spain, we find that workers in bigger cities do not have higher initial unobserved ability as reflected in fixed effects. Instead, they obtain an immediate static premium and accumulate more valuable experience. The additional value of experience in bigger cities persists after leaving and is stronger for those with higher initial ability. This explains both the higher mean and greater dispersion of earnings in bigger cities.

In this paper we provide the exact formulas for the direct least squares estimation of statistical models that include both person and firm effects. We also provide an algorithm for determining the estimable functions of the person and firm effects (the identifiable effects). The computational techniques are also directly applicable to any linear two-factor analysis of covariance with two high-dimension non-orthogonal factors. We show that the application of the exact solution does not change the substantive conclusions about the relative importance of person and firm effects in the explanation of log real compensation; however, the correlation between person and firm effects is negative, not weakly positive, in the exact solution. We also provide guidance for using the methods developed in earlier work to obtain an accurate approximation.

data sources at the Census Bureau, these statistics offer unprecedented detail on the local dynamics of labor markets.Despite the fine geographic and industry detail, the confidentiality of the underlying micro-data is maintained by the application of new, state-of-the-art protection methods.The underlying data infrastructure was designed by the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program at the Census Bureau (Abowd, Haltiwanger, and Lane 2004).The Census Bureau collaborates with its state partners, the suppliers of critical administrative records from the state unemployment insurance programs, through the Local Employment Dynamics (LED) cooperative federal-state program.Although the QWI are the flagship statistical product published from the LEHD Infrastructure Files, the latter have found a much more widespread application.The infrastructure constitutes an encompassing and almost universal data source for individuals and firms of all forty-six currently participating states. 1 When complete, the LEHD Infrastructure Files will be the first nationally comprehensive statistical product developed from a universe that covers jobs-a statutory employment relation between an individual and employer-as distinct from ones that cover households (e.g., the Decennial Census of Population and Housing) or establishments (e.g., the Economic Censuses or the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages [QCEW]).In this chapter, we describe the primary input data underlying the LEHD Infrastructure Files, the methods by which the Infrastructure Files are compiled, and how these files are integrated to create the Quarterly Workforce Indicators.We also provide details about the statistical models used to improve the basic administrative data, and describe enhancements and limitations imposed by both data and legal constraints.Many of the infrastructure and derivative micro-data files are now available within the Research Data Centers of the U.S. Census Bureau, and we indicate these files during the discussion.

We quantify the importance of imperfect competition in the US labor market by estimating the size of labor market rents earned by American firms and workers. We construct a matched employer-employee panel dataset by combining the universe of US business and worker tax records for the period 2001–2015. Using this panel data, we identify and estimate an equilibrium model of the labor market with two-sided heterogeneity where workers view firms as imperfect substitutes because of heterogeneous preferences over nonwage job characteristics. The model allows us to draw inference about imperfect competition, worker sorting, compensating differentials, and rent sharing. (JEL D24, H24, H25, J22, J24, J31, J42)

Summary In the empirical literature on assortative matching using linked employer–employee data, unobserved worker quality appears to be negatively correlated with unobserved firm quality. We show that this can be caused by standard estimation error. We develop formulae that show that the estimated correlation is biased downwards if there is true positive assortative matching and when any conditioning covariates are uncorrelated with the firm and worker fixed effects. We show that this bias is bigger the fewer movers there are in the data, which is ‘limited mobility bias’. This result applies to any two-way (or higher) error components model that is estimated by fixed effects methods. We apply these bias corrections to a large German linked employer–employee data set. We find that, although the biases can be considerable, they are not sufficiently large to remove the negative correlation entirely.

A central question in labor economics and macroeconomics is whether the textbook competitive model provides an adequate representation of the labor market. Using longitudinal data on companies and establishments, this article suggests that it may not. As predicted by rent-sharing models of the labor market, changes in profitability are shown to feed through into long-run changes in wages. These are not temporary wage effects and are not driven by the unionized workplaces in the data. The article's estimates imply that, for rent-sharing reasons alone, Lester's "range" of wages is approximately 16%.

Fit ins are central to many theories of the labor market. However, the actual degree to which firms shape the structure of wages is still not well understood. this paper investigates (i) the importance of firms in explaining wage differences across individuals and industries, and (ii) how the nature of interfirm mobility job-to-job vs. job-unemployment-job - affects the relative importance of firms and workers in wage determination. Results indicate that (i) firms are much more important in explaining the variance of average wages across industries rather than across individuals, and (ii) using job-to-job transitions to identify the firm's contribution to the wage rate reduces the importance of firm wage policies in explaining wage differences by as much a 50%.

Many studies use matched employer-employee data to estimate a statistical model of earnings determination with worker and firm fixed effects. Estimates based on this model have produced influential yet controversial conclusions. The objective of this paper is to assess the sensitivity of these conclusions to the biases that arise because of limited mobility of workers across firms. We use employer-employee data from the United States and several European countries while taking advantage of both fixed effects and random effects methods for bias correction. We find that limited mobility bias is severe and that bias correction is important.

We study the role of establishment-specific wage premiums in generating recent increases in West German wage inequality. Models with additive fixed effects for workers and establishments are fit in four distinct time intervals spanning the period 1985-2009. Unlike standard wage models, specifications with both worker and plant-level heterogeneity components can explain the vast majority of the rise in wage inequality. Our estimates suggest that the increasing variability of West German wages results from a combination of rising heterogeneity between workers, rising variability in the wage premiums at different establishments, and increasing assortativeness in the matching of workers to plants. We use the models to decompose changes in wage gaps between different education levels, occupations, and industries, and in all three cases find a growing contribution of plant heterogeneity and rising assortativeness between workers and establishments.

Are more skilled workers employed by more productive firms? Are complementarities important in production? We provide three contributions to the measurement of sorting. First, we use a standard frictional sorting model to show that the standard empirical method used to measure sorting in the labor market can be biased in favor of not detecting sorting. Second, we isolate the economic mechanism responsible for this bias. Finally, we propose an alternative method to detect sorting that is immune from this bias. According to the model, sorting is prevalent in labor markets, as measured by our alternative method, but the standard method fails to detect it. This paper was part of my dissertation. I am indebted to Giuseppe Moscarini for the extensive advice and support. I would like to thank Fabian Lange, Fabien Postel-Vinay, Björn Brügemann, Jeremy Lise and Robert Shimer for their valuable comments and help. Very useful feedback was also received from participants at the seminars at Yale, UCL,

Many studies use matched employer-employee data to estimate a statistical model of earnings determination where log-earnings are expressed as the sum of worker effects, firm effects, covariates, and idiosyncratic error terms. Estimates based on this model have produced two influential yet controversial conclusions. First, firm effects typically explain around 20% of the variance of log-earnings, pointing to the importance of firm-specific wage-setting for earnings inequality. Second, the correlation between firm and worker effects is often small and sometimes negative, indicating little if any sorting of high-wage workers to high-paying firms. The objective of this paper is to assess the sensitivity of these conclusions to the biases that arise because of limited mobility of workers across firms. We use employer-employee data from the US and several European countries while taking advantage of both fixed-effects and random-effects methods for bias-correction. We find that limited mobility bias is severe and that bias-correction is important. Once one corrects for limited mobility bias, firm effects dispersion matters less for earnings inequality and worker sorting becomes always positive and typically strong.

We study the nature of firm pay dynamics. To this end, we propose a statistical model that extends the seminal framework by Abowd et al. (1999) to allow for idiosyncratically time-varying firm pay policies. We estimate the model using linked employer–employee data for Sweden from 1985 to 2016. By drawing on detailed firm financials data, we show that firms that become more productive and accumulate capital raise pay, whereas firms lower pay as they add workers. A secular increase in firm-year pay dispersion in Sweden since 1985 is accounted for by greater persistence of firm pay among incumbent firms as well as greater dispersion in firm pay among entrant firms, as opposed to more volatile firm pay.

We develop a new approach to measuring the correlation between the types of matched workers and firms. Our approach accurately measures the correlation in data sets with many workers and firms, but a small number of independent observations for each. Using administrative data from Austria, we find that the correlation between worker and firm types lies between 0.4 and 0.6. We use artificial data sets with correlated worker and firm types to show that our estimator is accurate. In contrast, the Abowd, Kramarz and Margolis (1999) fixed effects estimator suggests no correlation between types in our data set. We show both theoretically and empirically that this reflects an incidental parameter problem.

We propose leave-out estimators of quadratic forms designed for the study of linear models with unrestricted heteroscedasticity. Applications include analysis of variance and tests of linear restrictions in models with many regressors. An approximation algorithm is provided that enables accurate computation of the estimator in very large datasets. We study the large sample properties of our estimator allowing the number of regressors to grow in proportion to the number of observations. Consistency is established in a variety of settings where plug-in methods and estimators predicated on homoscedasticity exhibit first-order biases. For quadratic forms of increasing rank, the limiting distribution can be represented by a linear combination of normal and non-central 2 random variables, with normality ensuing under strong identification. Standard error estimators are proposed that enable tests of linear restrictions and the construction of uniformly valid confidence intervals for quadratic forms of interest. We find in Italian social security records that leave-out estimates of a variance decomposition in a two-way fixed effects model of wage determination yield substantially different conclusions regarding the relative contribution of workers, firms, and worker-firm sorting to wage inequality than conventional methods. Monte Carlo exercises corroborate the accuracy of our asymptotic approximations, with clear evidence of non-normality emerging when worker mobility between blocks of firms is limited.

We study the time-series properties of firm effects in the two-way fixed effects model popularized by Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999) (AKM) using two approaches. The firstthe rolling AKM approach (R-AKM)-estimates AKM models separately for successive twoyear intervals. The second-the time-varying AKM approach (TV-AKM)-is an extension of the original AKM model that allows for unrestricted interactions of year and firm indicators. We apply to both approaches the leave-out methodology of Kline, Saggio and Slvsten (2020) to correct for biases in the estimated variance components. Using administrative wage records from Washington State, we find, first, that firm effects for hourly wage rates are highly persistent with an autocorrelation coefficient between firm effects in 2002 and 2014 of 0.74. Second, the R-AKM approach reveals cyclicality in firm effects and worker-firm sorting. During the Great Recession the variability in firm effects increased, while the degree of worker-firm sorting decreased. Third, misspecification of standard AKM models resulting from restricting firm effects to be fixed over time appears to be minimal.

Abstract This article describes the processing and accessibility of the person and establishment fixed wage effects in German administrative data. These effects have been estimated following the approach of Abowd, J., Kramarz, F., and Margolis, D. (1999. High wage workers and high wage firms. Econometrica 67: 251–333) and Card, D., Heining, J., and Kline, P. (2013. Workplace heterogeneity and the rise of West German wage inequality. Q. J. Econ. 128: 967–1015). They can be linked to most of the available administrative datasets provided by the Research Data Center (FDZ) of the German Federal Employment Agency at the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). They are available for different time intervals from 1985 until 2021. These effects have been used in numerous articles that deal with the contributions of workers and establishments to earnings inequality.

In many OECD countries, low productivity growth has coincided with rising inequality. Widening wage and productivity gaps between firms may have contributed to both developments. This paper uses a new harmonised cross-country linked employer-employee dataset for 14 OECD countries to analyse the role of firms in wage inequality. The main finding is that, on average across countries, changes in the dispersion of average wages between firms explain about half of the changes in overall wage inequality. Two thirds of these changes in between-firm wage inequality are accounted for by changes in productivity-related premia that firms pay their workers above common market wages. The remaining third can be attributed to changes in workforce composition, including the sorting of high-skilled workers into high-paying firms. Over all, these results suggest that firms play an important role in explaining wage inequality as wages are driven to a significant extent by firm performance rather than being exclusively determined by workers' earnings characteristics.

This paper uses Statistics New Zealand’s Linked Employer-Employee Data (LEED) over the six year period April 1999–March 2005 to derive and analyse estimates of two-way worker and firm fixed effects components of job earnings rates. The fixed effects estimates reflect the portable earnings premium that each worker receives in whichever firm they work for, and the time-invariant premium that each firm pays to all the workers it employs. Our main estimates use full-time equivalent annual earnings for each job-year observation weighted by its effective employment, which involves about 18.7 million job-year observations for 2.8 million employees and 320,000 firms. Our analysis focuses on three issues. First, how much of the variation in job earnings rates is attributable to observable worker demographic factors (age and sex), unobserved worker effects and unobserved firm effects? We find that worker effects account for about one half, worker demographics one quarter, and firm effects 10–25 percent of the variance in job earnings. Second, how much compositional change occurred during this period of substantial employment growth? As measured by changes in the annual averages, worker and firm effects declined by about 5 and 1 percent, respectively, over the period. Third, what is the aggregate pattern of sorting of workers and firms across jobs? The correlation between worker and firm effects is 0.12, which is higher than international estimates and implies a tendency for high-earning workers to work for high-paying firms. A primary dimension along which sorting occurs is the full-time / part-time employment dimension. The results are qualitatively robust to various sensitivity tests, including unweighted estimation across all jobs, using only workers’ main jobs held in each year, jobs of workers estimated to be employed full-time during the year, and excluding jobs in firms that have a low degree of connectivity to other firms. The estimated correlation between worker and firm effects is higher based on unweighted jobs (0.18) and more-connected firms (0.17), but lower based on main job (0.06) and full-time workers (-0.01).

John M. ABOWD, Francis KRAMARZ, Human Capital and Worker Productivity: Direct Evidence from Linked Employer-Employee Data, Annales d'Économie et de Statistique, No. 79/80, Contributions in memory of Zvi Griliches (JULY/DECEMBER 2005), pp. 323-338

Abstract In this paper I analyze changes in the wage distribution in the Netherlands. I use a matched employer-employee dataset that covers the population of employees. Wage inequality increases over the period of 2001–2016. Changes in between-firm wage components are responsible for nearly the entire increase. Increases in the variance of workers’ skills and increases in worker sorting and worker segregation explain the majority of the rise in the variance of wages. These changes are accompanied by a pattern where variation in educational degree and firm average wages become more correlated over time. Finally, it is suggested that labor market institutions in the Netherlands play an important role in mediating overall wage inequality.

We investigate the heterogeneity of assortative labor matching with respect to geography, skills, and tasks. Our contribution is to separate plant quality by education level and occupation tasks using the AKM-model. We introduce a geology-related instrument to analyze the city effect and address limited mobility bias. Using rich administrative worker-plant dataset for Norway, we show that matching of the college educated have a strong city effect. The IV estimates indicate that a doubling of city size increases the correlation between worker and plant quality by 9 percentage points. A wage decomposition shows that matching accounts for 22% of the urban wage premium adjusted for sorting. In terms of occupations, better matching in cities is observed only for non-routine abstract tasks.

This paper reviews the literature on firm wage differences and the fixed effects methods typically used to measure these differences. High wage firms tend to be more productive, larger, more sought after by workers, and to employ more credentialed and higher wage workers. The latest evidence suggests high wage firms also tend to offer better amenities and are prone to outsourcing and mass layoffs. Reviewing the requirements of the “AKM model” of Abowd et al. (1999), I provide a graph theoretic interpretation of the restrictions this model places on the wage changes of workers who switch employers and examine the extent to which they are satisfied in a benchmark dataset. Assumptions are provided that give these wage changes a causal interpretation and I discuss some difficulties that arise in aggregating them into a global ranking of firm wage levels. In reviewing the econometrics of variance decompositions, I argue that attention ought to focus on effect sizes rather than variance shares, which can be difficult to compare across datasets with different noise levels. Cross-fitting and clustering methods for addressing limited mobility bias are reviewed. A series of bounding and imputation exercises suggest the network pruning typically used in conjunction with cross-fitting methods has little effect on estimands of interest. A review of the latest international evidence finds that the bias corrected standard deviation of firm effects tends to be substantially elevated in less developed countries. Variance estimation methods for second step regressions of firm effects on covariates are reviewed and illustrated with an empirical application to the firm size wage premium. Finally, I discuss connections between the AKM model and the celebrated sequential auction framework of Postel-Vinay and Robin (2002b), concluding with some areas for future work at this intersection.

Firms are central to many theories of the labor market. However, the actual degree to which firms shape the structure of wages is still not well understood. This paper investigates (i) the importance of firms in explaining wage differences across individuals and industries, and (ii) how the nature of interfirm mobility - job-to-job vs. job-unemployment-job - affects the relative importance of firms and workers in wage determination. Results indicate that (i) firms are much more important in explaining the variance of average wages across industries rather than across individuals, and (ii) using job-to-job transitions to identify the firm's contribution to the wage rate reduces the importance of firm wage policies in explaining wage differences by as much as 50%.

John M. Abowd, Francis Kramarz, Antoine Moreau, Product Quality and Worker Quality, Annales d'Économie et de Statistique, No. 41/42, La microéconométrie de la gestion des ressources humaines: Etudes internationales des pratiques d'entreprises / The Microeconometrics of Human-Resource Management: Multinational Studies of Firm Practices (Jan. - Jun., 1996), pp. 299-322

In most countries, average wages tend to be higher in larger cities. In this paper, we focus on the role played by the matching of workers to firms in explaining geographical wage differences. Using rich administrative German data for 1985-2014, we show that wages in large cities are higher not only because large cities attract more high-quality workers, but also because high-quality workers are significantly more likely to be matched to high-quality plants. In particular, we find that assortative matching—measured by the correlation of worker fixed effects and plant fixed effects—is significantly stronger in large cities. The elasticity of assortative matching with respect to population has increased by around 75% in the last 30 years. We estimate that in a hypothetical scenario in which we keep the quality and location of German workers and plants unchanged, and equalize within-city assortative matching geographical wage inequality in Germany would decrease significantly. Overall, assortative matching magnifies wage differences caused by worker sorting and is a key factor in explaining the growth of wage disparities between communities over the last three decades. If high-quality workers and firms are complements in production, moreover, increased assortative matching will increase aggregate earnings. We estimate that the increase in within-city assortative matching observed between 1985 and 2014 increased aggregate labor earnings in Germany by 2.1%, or 31.32 billion euros. We conclude that assortative matching increases earnings inequality across communities, but it also generates important efficiency gains for the German economy as a whole.

We decompose the real annual full time compensation costs of 1.1 million French workers followed over 12 years into a part that reflects their external opportunity wage and a part that reflects their internal wage rate. Using these components of compensation we investigate the extent to which firm-size wage differentials and inter-industry wage differentials are due to variability in the external wage (person effects) versus variability in the internal wage (firm effects). For France, we find that most of the firm-size wage effect and most of the inter-industry wage effect is due to person effects differences in the external wage rates.

This paper reviews the literature on firm wage differences and the fixed effects methods typically used to measure these differences.High wage firms tend to be more productive, larger, more sought after by workers, and to employ more credentialed and higher wage workers.The latest evidence suggests high wage firms also tend to offer better amenities and are prone to outsourcing and mass layoffs.Reviewing the requirements of the "AKM model" of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999), I provide a graph theoretic interpretation of the restrictions this model places on the wage changes of workers who switch employers and examine the extent to which they are satisfied in a benchmark dataset.Assumptions are provided that give these wage changes a causal interpretation and I discuss some difficulties that arise in aggregating them into a global ranking of firm wage levels.In reviewing the econometrics of variance decompositions, I argue that attention ought to focus on effect sizes rather than variance shares, which can be difficult to compare across datasets with different noise levels.Cross-fitting and clustering methods for addressing limited mobility bias are reviewed.A series of bounding and imputation exercises suggest the network pruning typically used in conjunction with cross-fitting methods has little effect on estimands of interest.A review of the latest international evidence finds that the bias-corrected standard deviation of firm effects tends to be substantially elevated in less developed countries.Variance estimation methods for second step regressions of firm effects on covariates are reviewed and illustrated with an empirical application to the firm size wage premium.Finally, I discuss connections between the AKM model and the celebrated sequential auction framework of Postel-Vinay and Robin (2002a), concluding with some areas for future work at this intersection.

Studying wage inequality requires understanding how workers and firms match. I propose a novel strategy to identify the complementarities in production between unobserved worker and firm attributes, based on the idea that positive (negative) sorting implies that firms upgrade (downgrade) their workforce quality when they grow in size. I use German matched employer-employee data to estimate a search and matching model with worker-firm complementarities, job-to-job transitions, and firm dynamics. The relationship between changes in workforce quality and firm growth rates in the data informs the strength of complementarities in the model. Thus, this strategy bypasses the lack of identification inherent to environments with constant firm types. I find evidence of negative sorting and a significant dampening effect of worker-firm complementarities on wage inequality. Worker and firm heterogeneity, differential bargaining positions, and sorting contribute 71%, 20%, 32% and -23% to wage dispersion, respectively. Reallocating workers across firms to the first-best allocation without mismatch yields an output gain of less than one percent.

This paper estimates a wage equation that includes worker- and firm fixed effects simultaneously, using a longitudinal matched employer-employee dataset covering virtually all Portuguese employees over a little more than two-decades. The exercise is performed under optimal conditions by using (a) data covering the whole population of employees and (b) adequate econometric methods and algorithms. The variation in log real hourly wages is then decomposed into six different components related to worker and firm characteristics (either observed or unobserved) and a residual component. It is found that worker heterogeneity is the most important source of wage variation (46.2 percent), due in roughly equal parts to the unobserved component (24.2 percent) and the observed component (22 percent). Firm effects are less important overall (29.6%), although firms’ observed characteristics do play an important role (14.8) in explaining wage differentials.

ABSTRACT

We measure the roles of the permanent component of worker and firm produc- tivities, complementarities between them, search frictions, and equilibrium sorting in driving German wage dispersion. We do this using a standard assortative matching model with on-the-job search. The model is identified and estimated using matched employer-employee data on wages and labor market transitions without imposing para- metric restrictions on the production technology. The model’s fit to the wage data is comparable to prominent wage regressions with additive worker and firm fixed effects that use many more degrees of freedom. Moreover, we propose a direct test that rejects the restrictions underlying the additive specification. We use the model to decompose the rise in German wage dispersion between the 1990s and the 2000s. We find that changes in the production function and the induced changes in equilibrium sorting pat- terns account for virtually all the rise in the observed wage dispersion. Search frictions are an important determinant of the level of wage dispersion but have had little impact on its rise over time.

Implements leave-out estimation of variance components in two-way fixed effects models as an 'R' translation of the original 'MATLAB' package of Kline, Saggio, and Solvsten (2020) &lt;<a href="https://doi.org/10.3982%2FECTA16410" target="_top">doi:10.3982/ECTA16410</a>&gt;. The package includes graph-based connected-set pruning, leave-out bias correction, leverage computation by exact and randomized algorithms, fixed effect estimation helpers, and companion model-fit summaries for matched worker-firm panels in the spirit of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999) &lt;<a href="https://doi.org/10.1111%2F1468-0262.00020" target="_top">doi:10.1111/1468-0262.00020</a>&gt;.

"Firm-to-Firm Trade: Imports, Exports, and the Labor Market" by Jonathan Eaton, Samuel Kortum, and Francis Kramarz, conditionally accepted at Econometrica. This repository contains the replication package for "Firm-to-Firm Trade: Imports, Exports, and the Labor Market" by Jonathan Eaton, Samuel Kortum, and Francis Kramarz. Jingze Dong, Adaolisa Ezekobe, Etienne Guigue, Lorenzo Kaaks, Tanay Kondiparthy, Titouan Le Calvé, Gautier Lenfant, Lixing Liang, Jonathan Libgober, Alexis Maitre, Berengere Patault, Max Perez Leon, and Laurence Wicht provided excellent research assistance at different stages that allowed this package to be created. The code in this replication package constructs the analysis files from confidential firm-level data matched to individual customers in each country of the European Union (EU). The package includes all non-confidential data used in the analysis including non-confidential moments generated from the confidential CASD (Centre d’Accès Sécurisé aux Données) data.

"Firm-to-Firm Trade: Imports, Exports, and the Labor Market" by Jonathan Eaton, Samuel Kortum, and Francis Kramarz, conditionally accepted at Econometrica. This repository contains the replication package for "Firm-to-Firm Trade: Imports, Exports, and the Labor Market" by Jonathan Eaton, Samuel Kortum, and Francis Kramarz. Jingze Dong, Adaolisa Ezekobe, Etienne Guigue, Lorenzo Kaaks, Tanay Kondiparthy, Titouan Le Calvé, Gautier Lenfant, Lixing Liang, Jonathan Libgober, Alexis Maitre, Berengere Patault, Max Perez Leon, and Laurence Wicht provided excellent research assistance at different stages that allowed this package to be created. The code in this replication package constructs the analysis files from confidential firm-level data matched to individual customers in each country of the European Union (EU). The package includes all non-confidential data used in the analysis including non-confidential moments generated from the confidential CASD (Centre d’Accès Sécurisé aux Données) data.

The AKM model introduced by Abowd, Kramarz and Margolis (1999) has become a workhorse to study worker and firm heterogeneity, and to understand the sources of wage dispersion in the labor market using linked employer-employee data. In this article, we introduce the model and estimator, discuss some best practices for estimation, and review some empirical findings on the role of worker and firm heterogeneity in wage dispersion. While the AKM methodology has proven useful to analyze a host of questions in a variety of settings within labor economics and beyond, we also point to the need for methodological developments.

The AKM model introduced by Abowd, Kramarz and Margolis (1999) has become a workhorse to study worker and firm heterogeneity, and to understand the sources of wage dispersion in the labor market using linked employer-employee data. In this article, we introduce the model and estimator, discuss some best practices for estimation, and review some empirical findings on the role of worker and firm heterogeneity in wage dispersion. While the AKM methodology has proven useful to analyze a host of questions in a variety of settings within labor economics and beyond, we also point to the need for methodological developments.

The AKM model introduced by Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999) has become a workhorse to study worker and firm heterogeneity, and to understand the sources of wage dispersion in the labor market using linked employer-employee data. In this article, we introduce the model and estimator, discuss some best practices for estimation, and review some empirical findings on the role of worker and firm heterogeneity in wage dispersion. While the AKM methodology has proven useful to analyze a host of questions in a variety of settings within labor economics and beyond, we also point to the need for methodological developments.

This paper uses cross-sectional and longitudinal data to examine differences in pay for equally-skilled workers in different ind ustries. The major finding is that there is substantial dispersion in wages across industries, even after allowing for measured and unmeas ured labor quality, working conditions, fringe benefits, transitory d emand shocks, the threat of union-ization, union bargaining power, fi rm size, and other factors. In addition, evidence is presented demons trating that turnover has a negative relationship with industry wage differentials. These findings suggest that workers in high-wage indus tries receive noncompetitive rents. Copyright 1988 by The Econometric Society.

China's emergence as a great economic power has induced an epochal shift in patterns of world trade. Simultaneously, it has challenged much of the received empirical wisdom about how labor markets adjust to trade shocks. Alongside the heralded consumer benefits of expanded trade are substantial adjustment costs and distributional consequences. These impacts are most visible in the local labor markets in which the industries exposed to foreign competition are concentrated. Adjustment in local labor markets is remarkably slow, with wages and labor-force participation rates remaining depressed and unemployment rates remaining elevated for at least a full decade after the China trade shock commences. Exposed workers experience greater job churning and reduced lifetime income. At the national level, employment has fallen in the US industries more exposed to import competition, as expected, but offsetting employment gains in other industries have yet to materialize. Better understanding when and where trade is costly, and how and why it may be beneficial, is a key item on the research agenda for trade and labor economists.

Andrew B. Bernard, J. Bradford Jensen, Robert Z. Lawrence, Exporters, Jobs, and Wages in U.S. Manufacturing: 1976-1987, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Microeconomics, Vol. 1995 (1995), pp. 67-119

We synthesize two related literatures on firm-level drivers of wage inequality. Studies of rent sharing that use matched worker-firm data find elasticities of wages with respect to value added per worker in the range of 0.05–0.15. Studies of wage determination with worker and firm fixed effects typically find that firm-specific premiums explain 20% of overall wage variation. To interpret these findings, we develop a model of wage setting in which workers have idiosyncratic tastes for different workplaces. Simple versions of this model can rationalize standard fixed effects specifications and also match the typical rent-sharing elasticities in the literature.

Abstract We analyze the effect of exposure to international trade on earnings and employment of U.S. workers from 1992 through 2007 by exploiting industry shocks to import competition stemming from China’s spectacular rise as a manufacturing exporter paired with longitudinal data on individual earnings by employer spanning close to two decades. Individuals who in 1991 worked in manufacturing industries that experienced high subsequent import growth garner lower cumulative earnings, face elevated risk of obtaining public disability benefits, and spend less time working for their initial employers, less time in their initial two-digit manufacturing industries, and more time working elsewhere in manufacturing and outside of manufacturing. Earnings losses are larger for individuals with low initial wages, low initial tenure, and low attachment to the labor force. Low-wage workers churn primarily among manufacturing sectors, where they are repeatedly exposed to subsequent trade shocks. High-wage workers are better able to move across employers with minimal earnings losses and are more likely to move out of manufacturing conditional on separation. These findings reveal that import shocks impose substantial labor adjustment costs that are highly unevenly distributed across workers according to their skill levels and conditions of employment in the pre-shock period.

Abstract There is growing evidence that firm-specific pay premiums are an important source of wage inequality. These premiums will contribute to the gender wage gap if women are less likely to work at high-paying firms or if women negotiate (or are offered) worse wage bargains with their employers than men. Using longitudinal data on the hourly wages of Portuguese workers matched with income statement information for firms, we show that the wages of both men and women contain firm-specific premiums that are strongly correlated with simple measures of the potential bargaining surplus at each firm. We then show how the impact of these firm-specific pay differentials on the gender wage gap can be decomposed into a combination of sorting and bargaining effects. We find that women are less likely to work at firms that pay higher premiums to either gender, with sorting effects being most important for low- and middle-skilled workers. We also find that women receive only 90% of the firm-specific pay premiums earned by men. Importantly, we find the same gender gap in the responses of wages to changes in potential surplus over time. Taken together, the combination of sorting and bargaining effects explain about one-fifth of the cross-sectional gender wage gap in Portugal.

Lawrence F. Katz, Lawrence H. Summers, Robert E. Hall, Charles L. Schultze, Robert H. Topel, Industry Rents: Evidence and Implications, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. Microeconomics, Vol. 1989 (1989), pp. 209-290

This article analyzes the effect of trade liberalization on employment and wages in the Mexican manufacturing sector. The study documents that many of the rents generated by trade protection were absorbed by workers in the form of a wage premium. Trade liberalization affected firm‐level employment and wages by shifting down industry product and labor demand. This in itself may have accounted for a 3%–4% decline in real wages on average. But trade reform also reduced the rents available to be captured by firms and workers. This had an additional negative effect on firm‐level employment and wages.

This paper introduces time-varying grouped patterns of heterogeneity in linear panel data models. A distinctive feature of our approach is that group membership is left unrestricted. We estimate the parameters of the model using a “grouped fixed-effects” estimator that minimizes a least squares criterion with respect to all possible groupings of the cross-sectional units. Recent advances in the clustering literature allow for fast and efficient computation. We provide conditions under which our estimator is consistent as both dimensions of the panel tend to infinity, and we develop inference methods. Finally, we allow for grouped patterns of unobserved heterogeneity in the study of the link between income and democracy across countries.

This article analyzes how patent-induced shocks to labor productivity propagate into worker compensation using a new linkage of U.S. patent applications to U.S. business and worker tax records. We infer the causal effects of patent allowances by comparing firms whose patent applications were initially allowed to those whose patent applications were initially rejected. To identify patents that are ex ante valuable, we extrapolate the excess stock return estimates of Kogan et al. (2017) to the full set of accepted and rejected patent applications based on predetermined firm and patent application characteristics. An initial allowance of an ex ante valuable patent generates substantial increases in firm productivity and worker compensation. By contrast, initial allowances of lower ex ante value patents yield no detectable effects on firm outcomes. Patent allowances lead firms to increase employment, but entry wages and workforce composition are insensitive to patent decisions. On average, workers capture roughly 30 cents of every dollar of patent-induced surplus in higher earnings. This share is roughly twice as high among workers present since the year of application. These earnings effects are concentrated among men and workers in the top half of the earnings distribution and are paired with corresponding improvements in worker retention among these groups. We interpret these earnings responses as reflecting the capture of economic rents by senior workers, who are most costly for innovative firms to replace.

This paper analyzes the role of establishments in the upward trend in dispersion of earnings that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of log earnings among individuals into the part due to changes in earnings among establishments and the part due to changes in earnings within establishments. The main finding is that much of the 1970s–2010s increase in earnings inequality results from increased dispersion of the earnings among the establishments where individuals work. Our results direct attention to the role of establishment-level pay setting and economic adjustments in earnings inequality.

This article estimates workers' preferences for firms by studying the structure of employer-to-employer transitions in U.S. administrative data. The article uses a tool from numerical linear algebra to measure the central tendency of worker flows, which is closely related to the ranking of firms revealed by workers' choices. There is evidence for compensating differentials when workers systematically move to lower-paying firms in a way that cannot be accounted for by layoffs or differences in recruiting intensity. The estimates suggest that compensating differentials account for over half of the firm component of the variance of earnings.

Researchers’ interest in monopsony has increased in recent years. This article reviews the accumulating evidence that employers have considerable monopsony power. It summarizes the application of this idea to explaining the impact of minimum wages and immigration, in anti-trust, and in understanding how to model the determinants of earnings in matched employer–employee data sets and the implications for inequality and the labor share.

Evidence from the United States, Britain, and France suggests that recent growth in wage inequality has been accompanied by greater segregation of high-and low-skill workers into separate firms.

The article structually estimates an on‐the‐job search model of job separations. Given each employer pays observably equivalent workers the same but wages are dispersed across employers, an employer's separation flow is the sum of an exogenous outflow unrelated to the wage and a job‐to‐job flow that decreases with the employer's wage. Using data from the Danish Integrated Database for Labour Market Research, the empirical results imply, as predicted by theory, that search effort declines with the wage. Furthermore, the estimates explain the employment effect, defined as the horizontal difference between the distribution of wages earned and the wage offer distribution.

Abstract I investigate the importance of the match between teachers and schools for student achievement. I show that teacher effectiveness increases after a move to a different school and estimate teacher-school match effects. Match quality explains away a quarter of and has two-thirds the explanatory power of teacher quality. Match quality is negatively correlated with school switching, is unrelated to exit, and increases with experience. This paper provides the first estimates of worker-firm match quality using output data, as opposed to inferring productivity from wages or employment durations. The results suggest that workers seek high-quality matches for reasons other than higher pay.

Why are workers with identical skills found in both "good" jobs and "bad" jobs? Why are workers who do similar jobs paid differently, contrary to standard competitive theory? Observable differences in workers doing the same job account for only 30 percent of wage variation. In Wage Dispersion, Dale Mortensen examines the reasons for pay differentials in the other 70 percent. He finds that these differentials, or wage dispersion, are largely the result of job search friction (which arises when workers do not know the wages offered by all employers) and cross-firm differences in wage policy and productivity. Mortensen examines previous theoretical explanations for wage dispersion, testing them against data from a Danish matched employer-employee database. He begins by offering a simple one-period model of the problem, then expands this basic model intertemporally to include the role of on-the-job worker search behavior. Following this, he discusses theoretical modifications that offer an explanation for the nature of observed wage dispersion, particularly the shape of cross-firm wage distribution. He then examines the hypothesis that wage policies are determined by profit-maximizing behavior and finds that the Danish data do not support it; he argues that bilateral wage bargaining is the more likely determinant. Finally, he reviews recent work that extends the basic theoretical framework to explain wage dispersion within firms.

Abstract Using a linked employer–employee dataset, this paper analyses the relationship between firm profitability and wages. Particular emphasis is given to the question of whether the sensitivity of wages to firm‐specific rents varies with collective bargaining coverage. To address this issue, we distinguish sector‐ and firm‐specific wage agreements and wage determination without any bargaining coverage. Our findings indicate that individual wages are positively related to firm‐specific quasi‐rents in the non‐union sector and under firm‐specific contracts. Industry‐wide wage contracts, however, are associated with a significantly lower responsiveness of wages to firm‐level profitability.

We develop a life-cycle model of the labor market in which different worker-firm matches have different quality and the assignment of the right workers to the right firms is time consuming because of search and learning frictions. The rate at which workers move between unemployment, employment and across different firms is endogenous because search is directed and, hence, workers can choose whether to seek low-wage jobs that are easy to find or high-wage jobs that are hard to find. We calibrate our theory using data on labor market transitions aggregated across workers of different ages. We validate our theory by showing that it predicts quite well the pattern of labor market transitions for workers of different ages. Finally, we use our theory to decompose the age profiles of transition rates, wages and productivity into the effects of age variation in work-life expectancy, human capital and match quality.

I discuss the recent literature that has led to new interest in the idea of monopsonistic wage setting. Building on advances in search theory and in models of differentiated products, researchers have used a number of different strategies to identify the elasticity of firm-specific labor supply. A growing consensus is that firms have some wage-setting power, though many questions remain about the sources of that power. (JEL B21, D21, D24, D43, J22, J31, J42)

Why do firms pay different wages? Empirical evidence suggests the presence of substantial differences in firm pay controlling for worker skill. Moreover, these differences are uncorrelated with skills, indicating the absence of sorting. I show that the face value interpretation is inconsistent with evidence on coworker segregation. I interpret the evidence by applying a sorting model and show that the correlation is biased. I identify nonmonotonicities in wages as the reason for this bias and show that a measure of worker-coworker sorting is more accurate. By calibrating the model to US data, I confirm that the model matches many job market characteristics.

This paper links data on establishments and individuals to analyze the role of establishments in the increase in inequality that has become a central topic in economic analysis and policy debate. It decomposes changes in the variance of ln earnings among individuals into the part due to changes in earnings among establishments and the part due to changes in earnings within-establishments and finds that much of the 1970s-2010s increase in earnings inequality results from increased dispersion of the earnings among the establishments where individuals work. It also shows that the divergence of establishment earnings occurred within and across industries and was associated with increased variance of revenues per worker. Our results direct attention to the fundamental role of establishment-level pay setting and economic adjustments in earnings inequality.

There has been a remarkable increase in wage inequality in the US, UK and many other countries over the past three decades. A significant part of this appears to be within observable groups (such as age-gender-skill cells). A generally untested implication of many theories rationalizing the growth of within-group inequality is that firm-level productivity dispersion should also have increased. The relevant data for the US is problematic, so we utilize a UK panel dataset covering the manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors since the early 1980s. We find evidence that productivity inequality has increased. Existing studies have underestimated this increased dispersion because they use data from the manufacturing sector which has been in rapid decline. Most of the increase in individual wage inequality has occurred because of an increase in inequality between firms (and within industries). Increased productivity dispersion appears to be linked with new technologies as suggested by models such as Caselli (1999) and is not primarily due to an increase in transitory shocks, greater sorting or entry/exit dynamics.

Abstract This paper draws on employer-employee and longitudinal plant data from Mexico to investigate the impact of exports on wage premiums, defined as wages above what workers would receive elsewhere in the labor market. We decompose plant-level average wages into a component reflecting skill composition and a component reflecting wage premiums. Using the late-1994 peso devaluation interacted with initial export propensity as a source of exogenous changes in exports, we find that exports have a significant positive effect on wage premiums and that the effect on wage premiums accounts for essentially all of the medium-term effect of exporting on plant-average wages.

Matched employer-employee data contain information collected from households and individuals as well as information collected from businesses or establishments. Both administrative and sample survey sources are considered. Both longitudinal and cross-sectional applications are discussed. We review studies from 17 different countries using 38 different systems for creating the linked data. We provide a detailed discussion of the methods used to create the linked datasets, the statistical and economic models used to analyze these data, and a comprehensive set of results from the different countries. We consider compensation structure, wage and employment mobility, and the relation between firm outcomes and worker characteristics in detail. Matched employer-employee data provide the empirical basis for further refinements of the theory of workplace organization, compensation design, mobility and production; however, the arrival of these data has been relatively recent.

Two cornerstones of empirical and policy analysis of firms, in macro, labor and industrial organization, are the determinants of the firm size distribution and the determinants of sorting between workers and firms. We propose a unifying theory of production where management resolves a tradeoff between hiring more versus better workers. The span of control or size is therefore intimately intertwined with the sorting pattern. We provide a condition for sorting that captures this tradeoff between the quantity and quality of workers and that generalizes Becker's sorting condition. A system of differential equations determines the equilibrium allocation, the firm size, and wages, and allows us to characterize the allocation of the quality and quantity of labor to firms of different productivity. We show that our model nests a large number of widely used existing models. We also augment the model to incorporate labor market frictions in the presence of sorting with large firms.

We measure the effects of firm policies on racial pay differences in Brazil. Non-Whites are less likely to be hired by high-wage firms, explaining about 20 percent of the racial wage gap for both genders. Firm-specific pay premiums for non-Whites are also compressed relative to Whites, contributing another 5 percent for that gap. A counterfactual analysis reveals that about two-thirds of the underrepresentation of non-Whites at higher-wage firms is explained by race-neutral skill-based sorting. Non-skill-based sorting and differential wage setting are largest for college-educated workers, suggesting that the allocative costs of discriminatory hiring and pay policies may be relatively large in Brazil. (JEL J15, J24, J31, J41, J46, J71, O15)

We analyze an equilibrium labor market with on-the-job search and experience effects (as workers learn by doing). The analysis yields a Mincer wage equation with worker fixed effects and endogenously determined firm fixed effects. Equilibrium sorting—where over time more experienced workers also tend to move to better paid employment—has a significant impact on wage inequality.

Abstract Using administrative German data, we show that large cities allow for a more efficient matching between workers and firms and this has important consequences for geographical inequality. Specifically, the match between high-quality workers and high-quality plants is significantly tighter in large cities relative to small cities. Wages in large cities are higher not only because of the higher worker quality but also because of a stronger assortative matching. Strong assortative matching in large cities magnifies wage differences caused by worker sorting, and is a key factor in explaining the growth of geographical wage disparities over the last three decades.

Sequential auction models of labor market competition predict that the wages required to successfully poach a worker from a rival employer will depend on the productivities of both the poached and poaching firms. We develop a theoretically grounded extension of the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd et al. (1999) in which log hiring wages are comprised of a worker fixed effect, a fixed effect for the ‘‘destination’’ firm hiring the worker, and a fixed effect for the ‘‘origin’’ firm, or labor market state, from which the worker was hired. This specification is shown to nest the reduced form for hiring wages delivered by semi-parametric formulations of the canonical sequential auction model of Postel-Vinay and Robin (2002b) and its generalization in Bagger et al. (2014). Fitting the model to Italian social security records, origin effects are found to explain only 0.7% of the variance of hiring wages among job movers, while destination effects explain more than 23% of the variance. Across firms, destination effects are more than 13 times as variable as origin effects. Interpreted through the lens of Bagger et al. (2014)’s model, this finding requires that workers possess implausibly strong bargaining strength. Studying a cohort of workers entering the Italian labor market in 2005, we find that differences in origin effects yield essentially no contribution to the evolution of the gender gap in hiring wages, while differences in destination effects explain the majority of the gap at the time of labor market entry. These results suggest that where a worker is hired from tends to be relatively inconsequential for their wages in comparison to where they are currently employed.

When wage contracts are relatively short-lived, rent sharing may reduce the incentives for investment since some of the returns to sunk capital are captured by workers. In this paper we use a matched worker-firm data set from the Veneto region of Italy that combines Social Security earnings records for employees with detailed financial information for employers to measure the degree of rent sharing and test for holdup. We estimate wage models with job match effects, allowing us to control for any permanent differences in productivity across workers, firms, and job matches. We also compare OLS and instrumental variables specifications that use sales of firms in other regions of the country to instrument value-added per worker. We find strong evidence of rent-sharing, with a "Lester range" of variation in wages between profitable and unprofitable firms of around 10%. On the other hand we find little evidence that bargaining lowers the return to investment. Instead, firm-level bargaining in Veneto appears to split the rents after deducting the full cost of capital. Our findings are consistent with a dynamic bargaining model (Crawford, 1988) in which workers pay up front for the returns to sunk capital they will capture in later periods.

In labor markets with worker and firm heterogeneity, the matching between firms and workers may be assortative, meaning that the most productive workers and firms team up. We investigate this with longitudinal population-wide matched employer-employee data from Portugal. Using panel data methods, we quantify a firm-specific productivity term for each firm, and we relate this to the skill distribution of workers in the firm. We find that there is positive assortative matching, in particular among long-lived firms. Using skill-specific estimates of an index of search frictions, we find that the results can only to a small extent be explained by heterogeneity of search frictions across worker skill groups. © 2010 Elsevier B.V.

Abstract\n Many biases plague the analysis of whether employers share rents with their employees, unlike what is predicted by the competitive labour market model. Using a Portuguese matched employer-employee panel, this paper is one of the first to address these biases in three complementary ways: 1) Controlling directly for the fact that firms that share more rents will, ceteris paribus, have lower net-of-wages profits. 2) Instrumenting profits via interactions between the exchange rate and the share of exports in firms? total sales. 3) Considering firm or firm/worker spell fixed effects and highlighting the role of downward wage rigidity. These approaches clarify conflicting findings in the literature and result, in our preferred specifications, in significant evidence of rent sharing (a Lester range of pay dispersion of 56%), also shown to be robust to a number of competitive interpretations.

This article constructs and estimates a model of wage bargaining with on‐the‐job search to explore three different components of wages: general human capital, match‐specific capital, and outside options. As the workers find better job opportunities, the current employer has to compete with outside firms to retain them. This between‐firm competition results in wage growth even when productivity remains the same. The model is estimated by a simulated minimum distance estimator and data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth. The results indicate that the improved value of the outside option raises wages by 14%–16% in the first 5 years.

Using a linked employer-employee data set of the German manufacturing sector, this paper analyses the role of exporting establishments in explaining rising wage dispersion both within and between skill groups in the time period 1996 to 2007. A decomposition analysis shows that the strong increase in the exporter wage gap, conditional on workers' skill levels, contributed to the growth in wage inequality, whereas the increase in the exporters' share in total employment worked towards a reduction in wage dispersion. The resulting net contribution is positive (inequality-increasing) but moderate. These findings are consistent with recent heterogeneous-firm trade models that feature an exporter wage premium as well as variability of the premium with respect to increasing trade liberalisation. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.

Large firms have paid significantly higher wages for over a century. Based on administrative data we document that the large-firm wage premium (LFWP) has declined steadily over the last 30 years. Decomposing pay into worker and firm fixed effects, we then document that the LFWP can be largely explained by a rise in firm effects with firm size. The dramatic decline is due a reduction in these firm effects at large firms. These changes have been concentrated at very large employers. In contrast, worker composition has changed little. We also find the majority of the change occurs within industries.

Decomposing the year-to-year changes in the earnings distribution from 2004 to 2013, we analyze the role of the employer in explaining earnings inequality in the United States. Movements between the bottom, middle, and top involve 20.5 million workers each year. Another 19.9 million move between employment and nonemployment. There are large gains from working at a top-paying firm for all skill types. Working for a high-paying firm produces benefits today, through higher earnings, that persist through an increase in the probability of upward mobility. High-paying firms facilitate moving workers to the top of the distribution and keeping them there.

We show, theoretically and empirically, that the effects of technological change associated with automation and offshoring on the labor market can substantially deviate from standard neoclassical conclusions when search frictions hinder efficient assortative matching between firms with heterogeneous tasks and workers with heterogeneous skills. Our key hypothesis is that better matches enjoy a comparative advantage in exploiting automation and a comparative disadvantage in exploiting offshoring. It implies that automation (offshoring) may reduce (raise) employment by lengthening (shortening) unemployment duration due to higher (lower) match selectivity. We find empirical support for this implication in a dataset covering 92 occupations and 16 sectors in 13 European countries from 1995 to 2010.

International trade has been cited as a source of widening wage inequality in industrial nations. Most previous empirical evidence supports this claim by showing an effect in which increasing exports tilt demand towards firms which export and employ a relatively large proportion of higher-skilled workers from the group of firms which do not export. We find that, in addition to this, there is also an effect whereby, among exporting firms, there is a significant wage premium for high-skilled workers and a wage discount for low-skilled workers. These estimates are based on a matched employer-employee data set of western German manufacturing firms over the period 1993-2007. Our estimates suggest that export activity can be associated with up to 30% of within and between skill group wage inequality. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.

We study the extent to which employer heterogeneity affects gender gaps in earnings across the distribution, over time, and over the life cycle, accounting for cohort effects. Using a linked employer-employee dataset for Italy, we show that the gender gap in firm pay premia explains 34% of the mean gender pay gap, mainly due to between-firm components. Within-firm differences are more important at the top of the distribution and have become more relevant over time. Gender differences in mobility toward firms with higher pay premia and within-firm gender inequality partly explain the gender gap in firm pay premia.

We use longitudinal data from the income tax system to study the impacts of firms' employment and wage-setting policies on the level and change in immigrant-native wage differences in Canada. We focus on immigrants who arrived in the early 2000s, distinguishing between those with and without a college degree from two broad groups of countries – the U.S., the U.K. and Northern Europe, and the rest of the world. Consistent with a growing literature based on the two-way fixed effects model of Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999), we find that firm-specific wage premiums explain a significant share of earnings inequality in Canada and contribute to the average earnings gap between immigrants and natives. In the decade after receiving permanent status, earnings of immigrants rise relative to those of natives. Compositional effects due to selective outmigration and changing participation play no role in this gain. About one-sixth is attributable to movements up the job ladder to employers that offer higher pay premiums for all groups, with particularly large gains for immigrants from the "rest of the world" countries.

We study the impact on New Technologies (NT) on wages using a panel that matches data on individuals and on their firms. In his article on the same topic, Krueger (1993) did not give a definitive answer to the following question: if workers who use NT are better paid, is it because they are abler or because NT increases their productivity. We try to provide an answer to this question. Comparing cross-section estimates and individual fixed-effect estimates, we show that computer-based new technologies are used by abler workers. These workers learn and become more productive when they get more experienced with these NT. In terns of wage differentials, the introduction of computer-based NT contributes to a small increase. The use of firm-level data does not modify these conclusions.

Microeconomic data on individual firms and employer-employee matches reveal substantial and persistent dispersion in firm size, productivity, and average wage paid and a positive correlation between each pair. To the extent that intrinsic differences in firm productivity explain these facts, there are several important consequences. First, the reallocation of employment from less to more productive firms will yield efficiency gains. Second, workers will find it in their interest to seek out higher-paying employers. Recent research has provided support for both hypotheses. Third, the existence of worker and employer heterogeneity offers possible gains from sorting. However, because the problem of identifying the presence of sorting is model dependent, it is too early for conclusions about its significance.

Abstract Abstract We reconsider the potential for explaining inter‐industry wage differences by decomposing those differences into parts due to individual and employer heterogeneity, respectively. Using longitudinally linked employer‐employee data, we estimate the model for the United States and France. The part arising from individual heterogeneity can be theoretically and empirically related to the worker’s opportunity wage rate. The part arising from employer heterogeneity can similarly be related to product market quasi‐rents and relative bargaining power. We find that these two variables are highly correlated with both parts of the differential in France. Although the U.S. inter‐industry wage differentials are strongly correlated with those in France, the decomposition is more nuanced in the American data, where the opportunity wage rate and the product market conditions are related to both the personal and employer heterogeneity. JEL codes J31, J50, L10

We suggest that the impact of globalization on wages has been missed because its effects must be captured by analyzing occupational exposure to globalization. In this paper, we extend our previous work to include recent years (2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008), a period of increasing import penetration, China's entry into the WTO, and growing US multinational employment abroad. We find significant effects of globalization, with offshoring to low wage countries and imports both associated with wage declines for US workers. We present evidence that globalization has led to the reallocation of workers away from high wage manufacturing jobs into other sectors and other occupations, with large declines in wages among workers who switch, explaining the large differences between industry and occupational analyses. While other research has focused primarily on China's trade, we find that offshoring to China has also contributed to wage declines among US workers. However, the role of trade is quantitatively much more important. We also explore the impact of trade and offshoring on labor force participation rates. While offshoring to China has a negative impact on US labor force participation, other factors such as increasing computer use and substitution of capital for labor are significantly more important determinants of US employment rates across occupations.

Why are workers with identical skills found in both "good" jobs and "bad" jobs? Why are workers who do similar jobs paid differently, contrary to standard competitive theory? Observable differences in workers doing the same job account for only 30 percent of wage variation. In Wage Dispersion, Dale Mortensen examines the reasons for pay differentials in the other 70 percent. He finds that these differentials, or wage dispersion, are largely the result of job search friction (which arises when workers do not know the wages offered by all employers) and cross-firm differences in wage policy and productivity. Mortensen examines previous theoretical explanations for wage dispersion, testing them against data from a Danish matched employer-employee database. He begins by offering a simple one-period model of the problem, then expands this basic model intertemporally to include the role of on-the-job worker search behavior. Following this, he discusses theoretical modifications that offer an explanation for the nature of observed wage dispersion, particularly the shape of cross-firm wage distribution. He then examines the hypothesis that wage policies are determined by profit-maximizing behavior and finds that the Danish data do not support it; he argues that bilateral wage bargaining is the more likely determinant. Finally, he reviews recent work that extends the basic theoretical framework to explain wage dispersion within firms.

Abstract This paper investigates whether wage losses after job displacement are driven by lost firm wage premiums or worker productivity depreciations. We estimate losses in wages and firm wage premiums, the latter being measured as firm effects from a two-way fixed-effects wage decomposition. Using new German administrative data on displacements from small and large employers, we find that wage losses are to a large extent explained by losses in firm wage premiums and that premium losses are largely permanent. We show that losses strongly increase with pre-displacement employer size. This provides an explanation for large and persistent wage losses reported in previous displacement studies typically focusing on large employers, only.

In this paper I propose and estimate an equilibrium search model using matched employer-employee data to study the extent to which wage dierentials between men and women can be explained by differences in productivity, disparities in friction patterns, segregation or wage discrimination. The availability of matched employer-employee data is essential to empirically disentangle dierences in workers productivity across groups from dierences in wage policies toward those groups. The model features rent splitting, on-the-job search and twosided heterogeneity in productivity. It is estimated using German microdata. I nd that female workers are less productive and more mobile than males. Female workers have on average slightly lower bargaining power than their male counterparts. The total gender wage gap is 42 percent. It turns out that most of the gap, 65 percent, is accounted for by dierences in productivity, 17 percent of this gap is driven by segregation while dierences in destruction rates explain 9 percent of the total wage-gap. Netting out dierences in oer-arrival rates would increase the gap by 13 percent. Due to dierences in wage setting, female workers receive wages 9 percent lower than male ones.

John M. Abowd, Laurence Allain, Compensation Structure and Product Market Competition, Annales d'Économie et de Statistique, No. 41/42, La microéconométrie de la gestion des ressources humaines: Etudes internationales des pratiques d'entreprises / The Microeconometrics of Human-Resource Management: Multinational Studies of Firm Practices (Jan. - Jun., 1996), pp. 207-217

We evaluate the bias from endogenous job mobility in fixed-effects estimates of worker- and firm-specific earnings heterogeneity using longitudinally linked employer-employee data from the LEHD infrastructure file system of the U.S. Census Bureau. First, we propose two new residual diagnostic tests of the assumption that mobility is exogenous to unmodeled determinants of earnings. Both tests reject exogenous mobility. We relax exogenous mobility by modeling the matched data as an evolving bipartite graph using a Bayesian latent-type framework. Our results suggest that allowing endogenous mobility increases the variation in earnings explained by individual heterogeneity and reduces the proportion due to employer and match effects. To assess external validity, we match our estimates of the wage components to out-of-sample estimates of revenue per worker. The mobility-bias corrected estimates attribute much more of the variation in revenue per worker to variation in match quality and worker quality than the uncorrected estimates.

We survey two growing bodies of research on firm-level drivers of labor market inequality. The first examines how wages are affected by differences in employer productivity. Studies that focus on firm-specific productivity shocks and control for the non-random sorting of workers to firms typically find that a 10% increase in value-added per worker leads to somewhere between a 0.5% and 1.5% increase in wages. Given the wide variation in firm-specific productivity, elasticities of this size suggest that a significant fraction of wage inequality is tied to firm performance. A second literature estimates two-way fixed effects models that rely on the wage changes of people who move between firms to identify firm-specific wage premiums. This literature also concludes that firm pay setting is important for wage inequality, with many studies finding that firm wage effects contribute approximately 20% of the overall variance of wages. To interpret these findings, we develop a model of firm wage setting in which workers have idiosyncratic tastes for different workplaces. We show that simple versions of this model can rationalize the standard two-way fixed effects specification proposed by Abowd, Extended versions of the model can potentially explain differences in the wage premiums paid by a given employer to different subgroups of workers.

Francis Kramarz, Stéfan Lollivier, Louis-Paul Pelé, Wage Inequalities and Firm-Specific Compensation Policies in France, Annales d'Économie et de Statistique, No. 41/42, La microéconométrie de la gestion des ressources humaines: Etudes internationales des pratiques d'entreprises / The Microeconometrics of Human-Resource Management: Multinational Studies of Firm Practices (Jan. - Jun., 1996), pp. 369-386

Abstract In theoretical trade models with variable mark‐ups and collective wage bargaining, exposure to international markets might reduce the exporter wage premium. We test this prediction using linked German employer–employee data covering the years 1996–2007. To separate the rent‐sharing mechanism from assortative matching, we exploit individual worker information to construct profitability measures that are free of skill composition. Our results show that rent‐sharing is less pronounced in more export‐intensive firms or in more open industries. The exporter wage premium is highest for low‐productivity firms. In line with theory, these findings are unique to the subsample of plants covered by collective bargaining.

Earnings inequality in the United States has increased rapidly over the last three decades, but little is known about the role of firms in this trend. For example, how much of the rise in earnings inequality can be attributed to rising dispersion between firms in the average wages they pay, and how much is due to rising wage dispersion among workers within firms? Similarly, how did rising inequality affect the wage earnings of different types of workers working for the same employer-men vs. women, young vs. old, new hires vs. senior employees, and so on? To address questions like these, we begin by constructing a matched employer-employee data set for the United States using administrative records. Covering all U.S. firms between 1978 to 2012, we show that virtually all of the rise in earnings dispersion between workers is accounted for by increasing dispersion in average wages paid by the employers of these individuals. In contrast, pay differences within employers have remained virtually unchanged, a finding that is robust across industries, geographical regions, and firm size groups. Furthermore, the wage gap between the most highly paid employees within these firms (CEOs and high level executives) and the average employee has increased only by a small amount, refuting oft-made claims that such widening gaps account for a large fraction of rising inequality in the population.

IZA DP No. 13212 MAY 2020 Workforce Composition, Productivity and Pay: The Role of Firms in Wage Inequality In many OECD countries, low productivity growth has coincided with rising inequality. Widening wage and productivity gaps between firms may have contributed to both developments. This paper uses a new harmonised cross-country linked employer-employee dataset for 14 OECD countries to analyse the role of firms in wage inequality. The main finding is that, on average across countries, changes in the dispersion of average wages between firms explain about half of the changes in overall wage inequality. Two thirds of these changes in between-firm wage inequality are accounted for by changes in productivity-related premia that firms pay their workers above common market wages. The remaining third can be attributed to changes in workforce composition, including the sorting of high-skilled workers into high-paying firms. Over all, these results suggest that firms play an important role in explaining wage inequality as wages are driven to a significant extent by firm performance rather than being exclusively determined by workers’ earnings characteristics. JEL Classification: D2, J31, J38

An extensive micro data set matching firms, establishments and their employees, is used to study the determinants of earnings inequality in Portugal and its evolution from 1983 to 1992, with the Theil index, its decomposition, and the decomposition of its change as tools of analysis. The relevance of both worker and employer attributes in shaping earnings inequality and its trend is quantified. The impact of the firm on wage inequality in a European country is compared to the situation in the USA, and the results suggest that a more regulated and centralized European bargaining system might reduce the scope for firm action. A profile of an economy undergoing modernization, where rising labour market inequality signalled the lack of an adequate labour force, can be drawn, with the minimum wage having nonetheless a certain narrowing effect on the earnings distribution.

(negative) sorting results if the match production function is supermodular (submodular). If the production function is modular, no sorting obtains. We propose an identification strategy that allows identification of not only the presence of sorting in matching, but also the type of sorting, negative or positive. Like Eeckhout and Kircher (2008) we find that the commonly used wage decomposition in Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999) does not in itself identify sorting, although the mechanisms that lead to lack of identification in our model differ from that of the partnership model studied in Eeckhout and Kircher (2008).

We analyze how the legal enforceability of noncompete agreements (NCAs) affects labor markets.Using newly-constructed panel data, we find that higher NCA enforceability diminishes workers' earnings and job mobility, with larger effects among workers most likely to sign NCAs.These effects are far-reaching: changes in enforceability impose externalities on workers across state borders, suggesting that enforceability broadly affects labor market dynamism.We provide evidence that NCA enforceability primarily affects wages through its effect on workers' outside options; moreover, workers facing high enforceability are unable to leverage tight labor markets to increase earnings.We motivate these findings by embedding NCA enforceability in a search model with bargaining.Finally, higher NCA enforceability exacerbates gender and racial earnings gaps.

This paper demonstrates that heterogeneity in firms’ promotion of human capital accumulation is an important determinant of life-cycle earnings inequality. I use administrative micro data from Germany to show that different establishments offer systematically different earnings growth rates for their workers. This observation suggests that that the increase in inequality over the life cycle reflects not only inherent worker variation, but also differences in the firms that workers happen to match with over their lifetimes. To quantify this channel, I develop a life-cycle search model with heterogeneous workers and firms. In the model, a worker’s earnings can grow through both human capital accumulation and labor market competition channels. Human capital growth depends on both the worker’s ability and the firm’s learning environment. I find that heterogeneity in firm learning environments account for 40% of the increase in cross-sectional earnings variance over the life cycle, and that this mechanism is especially important for young workers. I then show that differences in labor market histories partially shape the worker-specific income profiles estimated by reduced-form statistical earnings processes. Finally, because young workers do not fully internalize the benefits of matching to high-growth firms, changes to the structure of unemployment insurance policies can incentivize these workers to search for better matches.

We use linked employer-employee data from Italy to explore the relationship between exports and wages. Exploiting the 1992 devaluation of the lira, we show that exporting firms both pay a wage premium above what their workers would earn in the outside labor market (the “rent-sharing” effect) and employ workers whose skills command a higher price after the devaluation (the “skill composition” effect). The latter only emerges once we allow for the value of workers’ skills to differ in the pre- and post-devaluation periods. We also document that the export wage premium is larger for workers with more export-related experience.

This paper examines how employer-and worker-specific productivity shocks transmit to earnings and employment in an economy with search frictions and firm commitment. We develop an equilibrium search model with worker and firm shocks and characterize the optimal contract offered by competing firms to attract and retain workers. In equilibrium, risk-neutral firms provide only partial insurance against shocks to risk-averse workers and offer contingent contracts, where payments are backloaded in good times and frontloaded in bad times. We prove that there exists a unique spot target wage, which serves as an attraction point for smooth wage adjustments. The structural model is estimated on matched employer-employee data from Sweden. The estimates indicate that firms absorb persistent worker and firm shocks, with respective passthrough values of 27 and 11%, but price permanent worker differences, a large contributor (32%) to variations in wages. A large share of the earnings growth variance can be attributed to job mobility, which interacts with productivity shocks. We evaluate the effects of redistributive policies and find that almost 40% of government-provided insurance is undone by crowding out firm-provided insurance.

Abstract Do firms adjust wages in response to changes in their own demand level or to changes in competitive pressure from rival employers? We study how exporters adjust wages in response to unexpected product demand shocks during the 2008–9 Great Recession. Using rich data on Portuguese firms’ pre-recession export shipments, we measure firm-level shocks to export demand during the Recession. We show that shocks constructed at the firm level are not necessarily firm-specific and can be decomposed into a common component affecting all producers in a product market and an idiosyncratic component affecting individual firms within markets based on the locations of their pre-recession customers. We demonstrate that while both components impact firms’ output and their workers’ wages, the common component spills over from firms to their labour market rivals, whereas the idiosyncratic component does not. We find that 10–15% of firms’ idiosyncratic demand passes through to their employees’ wage growth with no effect on retention rates, implying significant dependence of wages on noncompetitive quasi-rents. Moreover, we find that wages respond primarily to shifts in internal labour demand when labour markets are thin, but they respond more to competition from other employers when labour markets are fluid. These results indicate that employers’ ability to set wages hinges on the underlying competitiveness of the labour market.

We augment standard log earnings equations for workers in US manufacturing with variables reflecting measured and unmeasured attributes of their employer. Using panel employee-establishment data, we find that establishment-level employment, education of coworkers, capital equipment per worker, and firm-level R&D intensity affects earnings substantially. Unobserved characteristics of employers captured by employer fixed effects also contribute to the variance of log earnings, although less than unobserved characteristics of individuals captured by individual fixed effects. The observed and unobserved measures of employers mediate the effects of individual characteristics on earnings and increase earnings inequality through sorting of workers among establishments.

Wage inequality between similar workers has been on the rise in many rich countries. Recent empirical research suggests that heterogeneity in firm characteristics is crucial to understand wage dispersion. Lower trade costs as well as labor and product market reforms are considered critical drivers of inequality dynamics. We ask how these factors affect wage dispersion and how much of their effect on inequality is attributable to changes in wage dispersion between and within firms. To tackle these questions, we incorporate directed job search into a dynamic model of international trade where wage inequality results from the interplay of convex adjustment costs with firms’ different hiring needs along their life cycles. Fitting the model to German linked employer-employee data for the years 1996-2009, we find that firm heterogeneity explains about half of the surge in inequality. The most important mechanism is tougher product market competition driven by domestic product market deregulation and, indirectly, by international trade.

This paper investigates the contribution of firms to the gender gap in earnings on average, at different quantiles of the earnings distribution, and over time to shed light on the role of firm pay policies in hindering or reinforcing the gender wage gap and to identify how their impact comes about. Using a linked employer-employee dataset for Italy, we show that the gap in firm pay policies explains on average 30% of the gender pay gap in the period 1995-2015. Sorting of women in low pay firms explains a larger fraction of the gender pay gap than differences in bargaining, on average and at the bottom of the distribution, whereas the latter dominates at the top. Moreover, differences in bargaining have increased in importance over the two decades. To explain sorting, we investigate whether women have a lower probability of moving towards firms with higher pay rates, and find that this is indeed the case. This differential mobility penalises, in particular, highly skilled women and can be related to the variability in wages in destination firms, with women not moving to those with high (unexplained) variance in pay. We also find some evidence that the firm environment as captured by exogenous changes in the gender balance in leadership positions influences the bargaining power of women, indicating that the latter is partly institution-driven.

This paper studies wage dispersion in an equilibrium on-the-job-search model with endogenous search intensity. Workers differ in their permanent skill level and firms differ with respect to productivity. Positive (negative) sorting results if the match production function is supermodular (submodular). The model is estimated on Danish matched employer-employee data. We find evidence of positive assortative matching. In the estimated equilibrium match distribution, the correlation between worker skill and firm productivity is 0.12. The assortative matching has a substantial impact on wage dispersion. We decompose wage variation into four sources: Worker heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity, frictions, and sorting. Worker heterogeneity contributes 51% of the variation, firm heterogeneity contributes 11%, frictions 23%, and finally sorting contributes 15%. We measure the output loss due to mismatch by asking how much greater output would be if the estimated population of matches were perfectly positively assorted. In this case, output would increase by 7.7%.

This paper assesses the impact of international outsourcing/offshoring practices on the process of wage equalization across manufacturing sectors in a sample of EU27 economies (1995–2009). We discriminate between heterogeneous wage effects on different skill categories of workers (low, medium and high skill). The main focus is on the labour market outcomes of vertical integration, so we augment a model of conditional wage convergence through the inclusion of sector-specific broad and narrow outsourcing/offshoring indices based on input-output data (World Input Output Database, April 2012 release). Two-way relations between trade and wages are addressed through the use of a gravity-based sector-level instrument. We find no evidence supporting unconditional skill-specific wage convergence in EU sectors. In a conditional setting, (slow) wage convergence takes place, but international outsourcing plays a negligible role in wage equalization. Moreover, even though regression results indicate that offshoring reduces the wage growth of domestic medium- and low-skilled workers, we show that this negative effect is economically small.

We analyse an equilibrium labour market with on-the-job search and experience effects (where workers learn-by-doing). The analysis yields a standard Mincer wage equation with worker fixed effects and endogenously determined firm fixed effects. It shows that learning-by-doing increases equilibrium wage dispersion consistent with the data. Equilibrium sorting - where over time more experienced workers also tend to find and quit to better paid employment - has a significant impact on wage inequality. As the model yields a cross section distribution of wages paid with the 'right' structure (the density of wages paid is single peaked with a 'fat' Pareto right tail) and yields the 'right' time profile of worker wage outcomes (the initial 10 years of a worker's career are characterised by several job changes and rapid wage growth) it yields a new, coherent statistical structure for future applied work.

We quantify the importance of imperfect competition in the US labor market by estimating the size of labor market rents earned by American firms and workers. We construct a matched employer-employee panel dataset by combining the universe of US business and worker tax records for the period 2001–2015. Using this panel data, we identify and estimate an equilibrium model of the labor market with two-sided heterogeneity where workers view firms as imperfect substitutes because of heterogeneous preferences over nonwage job characteristics. The model allows us to draw inference about imperfect competition, worker sorting, compensating differentials, and rent sharing. (JEL D24, H24, H25, J22, J24, J31, J42)

This paper estimates a wage equation with three high-dimensional fixed effects, using a longitudinal matched employer-employee dataset covering virtually all Portuguese private sector wage earners over a 26-year interval. First, the variation in log real hourly wages is decomposed into three components reflecting worker, firm, and job title characteristics and a residual element. It is found that worker permanent heterogeneity is the most important source of wage variation accounting for one third of the wage variance, while firm permanent effects contribute one fourth. Job title fixed effects still explain a considerable one fifth of wage variance. Second, having established that high-wage workers tend to match with high-paying firms, worker fixed effects from the wage equation are next correlated with firm fixed effects from sales and value-added production equations to provide unambiguous evidence on the sign and strength of assortative matching. The correlations are positive and large, indicating that higher productivity workers tend to match with higher productivity firms.

Using matched employer-employee panel data, we estimate measures of pay dispersion per firm-year that take into account both firm and worker unobserved heterogeneity. Unlike research that controls only for differences in observables, we find that within-firm pay inequality is significantly associated to lower firm performance. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Abstract We use a large sample of German workers to analyse whether low-wage competition with China and Eastern Europe (the East) affects the wage structure within German manufacturing industries. In order to identify the channels through which trade and technology affect wage inequality, we decompose wages into firm and worker components. We find that the rise of market access and the competitiveness of the East has a substantial impact on inequality via the worker-wage component. While we find no large effect of the firm effect and assortative matching on overall inequality we find that trade induced matching is relevant for high-tech industries. We also account for exposure to technological change and do not find an effect on the dispersion of wage components. Overall, trade explains around 15% of the recent increase in wage inequality.

Outsourced workers experience large wage declines, yet domestic outsourcing may raise aggregate productivity. To study this equity-efficiency trade-off, we contribute a framework in which multi-worker firms either hire imperfectly substitutable worker types in-house along a wage ladder, or rent labor services from contractors who hire in the same frictional labor markets. Three implications arise. First, selection into outsourcing: more productive firms are more likely to outsource to save on labor costs and higher wage premia. Second, a productivity effect: outsourcing leads firms to raise output and labor demand. Third, an outsourcing wage penalty: contractor firms pay lower wages. We find support for all three implications in French administrative data and rule out alternative explanations. Instrumenting revenue productivity using export demand shocks, we find evidence for selection into outsourcing. Instrumenting outsourcing using variation in occupational exposure, we find evidence for the productivity effect. We confirm the outsourcing wage penalty with a movers design. After structurally estimating the model and validating it against our reduced-form estimates, we find that the rise in outsourcing in France between 1997 and 2016 lowers low skill service worker earnings and welfare by 1.5%. Outsourcing increases labor market sorting, lowers the share of rents going to workers, but raises aggregate output by 6%. A simultaneous 5.5% minimum wage hike stabilizes earnings and maintains employment and output gains.

We develop an equilibrium model of on-the-job search with ex-ante heterogeneous workers and firms, aggregate uncertainty and vacancy creation. The model produces rich dynamics in which the distributions of unemployed workers, vacancies and worker-firm matches evolve stochastically over time. We prove that the surplus function, which fully characterises the match value and the mobility decision of workers, does not depend on these distributions. We estimate the model on US labour market data from 1951-2007 and predict the fit for 2008-12. We use the model to measure the cyclicality of mismatch between workers and jobs.

In most countries, average wages tend to be higher in larger cities. In this paper, we focus on the role played by the matching of workers to firms in explaining geographical wage differences. Using rich administrative German data for 1985-2014, we show that wages in large cities are higher not only because large cities attract more high-quality workers, but also because highquality workers are significantly more likely to be matched to high-quality plants. In particular, we find that assortative matching-measured by the correlation of worker fixed effects and plant fixed effects-is significantly stronger in large cities. The elasticity of assortative matching with respect to population has increased by around 75%in the last 30 years. We estimate that in a hypothetical scenario in which we keep the quality and location of German workers and plants unchanged, and equalize within-city assortative matching geographical wage inequality in Germany would decrease significantly. Overall, assortative matching magnifies wage differences caused by worker sorting and is a key factor in explaining the growth of wage disparities between communities over the last three decades.

Recent theoretical analysis suggests that a reduction in the cost of exporting increases the degree of assortative matching between workers and firms in export-oriented industries. Changes that reduce the cost of imports have an ambiguous impact on matching. We combine detailed Swedish matched worker-firm data from 1995-2005 with tariff data to test these hypotheses. The data cover 94 sectors subject to international competition and include all firms with at least 20 employees. Our findings strongly support the theoretical predictions.

This paper introduces a framework to study the impact of trade liberalization on wage inequality and welfare in the presence of monopsonistic labor markets. The interaction of firm heterogeneity in productivity with idiosyncratic preferences of workers for working at different firms generates between-firm wage inequality for workers with identical skills. The degree of monopsony power is captured by the elasticity of firm-level labor supply, with a lower elasticity implying more wage-setting power by the firm. With more productive firms paying higher wages, monopsony power dampens the impact of firm heterogeneity on the allocation of market shares and allows lower productivity firms to survive. In a closed economy this increases inequality, but in an open economy high levels of monopsony power inhibit exporting, which may reduce inequality by compressing wages on the right side of the distribution. Nevertheless, inequality in the open economy is always higher than in autarky. Monopsony power reduces social welfare (for empirically plausible values of the labor supply elasticity) and the gains from trade.

In this article, we test a simple version of Becker's (1973) marriage model for wage setting. This model predicts positive assortative matching. We estimate this model using linked employer--employee data for the France and the United States. We reject the simple version for both countries. The zero or negative correlation between person and firm effects is not explained by estimation biases due to a lack of mobility in the data. Several other potential explanations are proposed, including Shimer (2001) style coordination friction models. We focus on direct evidence that good workers are employed by good firms. This provides a direct empirical test of the simplest version of the Becker matching model. We start by constructing a very simple structural model of production and pay that implies positive assortative matching between a worker and her employer, exactly in the spirit of Becker. We do structural estimation using both French and American matched longitudinal employer-employee data. Because the structural model implies that the log-wage of workers is the sum of a person-specific effect and a firm-specific effect, recently developed techniques (Abowd, Creecy and Kramarz 2002) can be used to estimate its parameters. Because the Becker model predicts positive assortative matching, the person and firm effects should be positively correlated. We examine this correlation and find that it is either negligibly positive (United States) or negative (France). The article discusses one possible interpretation -- biases in the estimated parameters because the mobility process that helps identify the structural parameters is not active enough. Even though this interpretation contains a grain of truth, the bias-corrected correlations are still, respectively, negligibly positive and negative. Therefore, these results must be taken at their face value. The remainder of the article tries to understand the implications of the rejection of this model. In particular, it discusses various hypotheses that are used in order to derive and estimate the structural model. First, a true and meaningful firm effect must exist. Second, the log-wage must be the sum of a person component and of a firm component. The first hypothesis that is needed in order to generate a true and meaningful firm effect is the absence of a perfectly competitive labor market. The second hypothesis -- the absence of comparative advantage in the economy -- comes from the structure of the compensation in the model: the log-wage is the sum of a person component and of a firm component.

In this paper, the authors use a linked&#13;\n employer-employee database from Brazil to examine the impact&#13;\n of trade reform on the wages of workers employed at&#13;\n heterogeneous firms. The analysis of the data at the&#13;\n firm-level confirms earlier findings of a differential&#13;\n positive effect of trade liberalization on the average wages&#13;\n at exporting firms relative to non-exporting firms. However,&#13;\n this analysis of average firm-level wages is incomplete&#13;\n along several dimensions. First, it cannot fully account for&#13;\n the impact of a change in trade barriers on workforce&#13;\n composition especially in terms of unobservable&#13;\n (time-invariant) characteristics of workers (innate ability)&#13;\n and any additional productivity that obtains in the context&#13;\n of employment in the specific firm (match specific ability).&#13;\n Furthermore, the firm-level analysis is undertaken under the&#13;\n assumption that the assignment of workers to firms is&#13;\n random. This ignores the sorting of worker into firms and&#13;\n leads to a bias in estimates of the differential impact of&#13;\n trade on workers at exporting firms relative to&#13;\n non-exporting firms. Using detailed information on worker&#13;\n and firm characteristics to control for compositional&#13;\n effects and using firm-worker match specific effects to&#13;\n account for the endogenous mobility of workers, the authors&#13;\n find the differential effect of trade openness on wages in&#13;\n exporting firms relative to domestic firms to be&#13;\n insignificant. Consistent with the models of Helpman,&#13;\n Itskhoki, and Redding (2010) and Davidson, Matusz and&#13;\n Schevchenko (2008), they also find that the workforce&#13;\n composition improves systematically in exporting firms in&#13;\n terms of innate (time invariant) worker ability and in terms&#13;\n the quality of the worker-firm matches.

Sequential auction models of labor market competition predict that the wages required to successfully poach a worker from a rival employer will depend on the productivities of both the poached and poaching firms. We develop a theoretically grounded extension of the two-way fixed effects model of This specification is shown to nest the reduced form for hiring wages delivered by semi-parametric formulations of the canonical sequential auction model of Postel-Vinay and Robin (2002b) and its generalization in Fitting the model to Italian social security records, origin effects are found to explain only 0.7% of the variance of hiring wages among job movers, while destination effects explain more than 23% of the variance. Across firms, destination effects are more than 13 times as variable as origin effects. Interpreted through the lens of Bagger et al. ( Studying a cohort of workers entering the Italian labor market in 2005, we find that differences in origin effects yield essentially no contribution to the evolution of the gender gap in hiring wages, while differences in destination effects explain the majority of the gap at the time of labor market entry. These results suggest that where a worker is hired from tends to be relatively inconsequential for their wages in comparison to where they are currently employed.

In this paper, we develop a model of wage dynamics and employment mobility with unrestricted interactions between worker and firm unobserved characteristics in both wages and employment mobility. We adopt the finite mixture approach of Bonhomme et al. (2017). The model is estimated on Danish matched employer-employee data for the period 1985–2013. The estimation includes gender, education, age, tenure and time controls. We find significant sorting on wages and it is stable over the period. Sorting is established early in careers, increasing during the first decade after which it declines steadily. Job-to-job mobility displays a “mean-reverting†pattern that maintains correlations between worker and firm types to a stationary level. Counterfactuals demonstrate that sorting is primarily driven by two channels: First, a “preference†channel whereby higher wage workers are more likely to accept jobs in higher wage firms. Second, a job finding channel where the job destination distribution out of non-employment is stochastically increasing in the wage type of the worker.

We propose a framework to identify and estimate earnings distributions and worker composition on matched panel data, allowing for two‐sided worker‐firm unobserved heterogeneity and complementarities in earnings. We introduce two models: a static model that allows for nonlinear interactions between workers and firms, and a dynamic model that allows, in addition, for Markovian earnings dynamics and endogenous mobility. We show that this framework nests a number of structural models of wages and worker mobility. We establish identification in short panels, and develop tractable two‐step estimators where firms are classified in a first step. Applying our method to Swedish administrative data, we find that log‐earnings are approximately additive in worker and firm heterogeneity. Our estimates imply the presence of strong sorting patterns between workers and firms, and a small contribution of firms—net of worker composition—to earnings dispersion. In addition, we document that wages have a direct effect on mobility, and that, beyond their dependence on the current firm, earnings after a job move also depend on the previous employer.

We synthesize two related literatures on firm-level drivers of wage inequality. Studies of rent sharing that use matched worker-firm data find elasticities of wages with respect to value added per worker in the range of 0.05–0.15. Studies of wage determination with worker and firm fixed effects typically find that firm-specific premiums explain 20% of overall wage variation. To interpret these findings, we develop a model of wage setting in which workers have idiosyncratic tastes for different workplaces. Simple versions of this model can rationalize standard fixed effects specifications and also match the typical rent-sharing elasticities in the literature.

In this paper we develop a model capturing key features of the Roy model, a search model, compensating differentials, and human capital accumulation on-the-job. We establish which features of the model can be non-parametrically identified and which can not. We estimate the model and use it to asses the relative contribution of the different factors for overall wage inequality. We find that Roy model inequality is the most important component accounting for the majority of wage variation. We also demonstrate that there is substantial interaction between the other features -most notably the importance of the job match obtained by search frictions varies from around 9% to around 29% depending on how we account for other features. Compensating differentials and search are both very important for explaining other features of the data such as the variation in utility. Search is important for turnover, but so is compensating differentials: 1/3 of all choices between two jobs would have resulted in a different outcome if the worker only cared about wages.

Abstract This paper evaluates the effect of foreign takeover on wages of workers in German establishments, using rich linked employer–employee data from 2003 to 2014. To identify a causal effect of foreign takeover, we combine propensity‐score matching with a difference‐in‐difference estimator. We find that a takeover by a foreign investor leads to a wage premium of 4.0 log points in the year after ownership change, which further increases to 6.3 log points 3 years after acquisition. The wage premium is largest for high‐skilled workers, which is consistent with three theoretical arguments, namely rent appropriation by managers , technology protection and training on new technology . We also show that the wage premium does not pick up an exporter effect due to a platform investment of the foreign owner, that it takes about 4 years before it fully develops, that it does not vanish after foreign divestment and that the wage increase is specific to foreign acquisition instead of ownership change per se.

Abstract This article investigates to what extent outward foreign direct investment (FDI) affects domestic wages. Results reveal that multinational companies pay a wage premium to their employees and the wage premium is increasing within the wage distribution. In a second step, we use a fixed effect and match effect model to analyze the effect of outward FDI within job spells. Results suggest that outward FDI raises manager wages by 0.077% and reduces wages for workers performing offshorable tasks by 0.34%. The positive effect of FDI on manager wages is mainly driven by the intensive margin of outward FDI. This result is observed even after controlling for endogenous worker mobility. Finally, we observe that the increase of outward foreign direct investment cause wages to be higher, and this effect is due to both multinational companies paying a wage premium and to changes in the market value of unobservable worker skills.

This paper addresses the impact of rising international trade exposure on individual earnings profiles in heterogeneous worker-establishment matches. We exploit rich panel data on job biographies of manufacturing workers in Germany, and apply a high-dimensional fixed effects approach to analyze endogenous mobility between plants, industries, and regions in response to trade shocks. Rising import penetration reduces earnings within job spells, and it induces workers to leave the exposed industries. Intra-industry mobility to other firms or regions are far less common adjustments. This induced industry mobility mitigates the adverse impacts of import shocks in the workers' subsequent careers, but their cumulated earnings over a longer time horizon are still negatively affected. By contrast, we find much less evidence for sorting into export-oriented industries, but the earnings gains mostly arise within job spells. These results point at an asymmetry in the individual labour market response to trade shocks: Import shocks trigger substantial "push effects", whereas the "pull effects" of export shocks are weaker.

The subdued wage growth observed over the last years in many countries has spurred renewed interest in monopsony views of the labour market. This paper is the first to measure the extent and robustness of employer labour-market power and its wage implications exploiting comprehensive matched employer-employee data. We find average (employment-weighted) Herfindhal indices of 800 to 1,100; and that less than 9% of workers are exposed to concentration levels thought to raise market power concerns. However, these figures can increase significantly with different methodological choices. Finally, when holding worker composition constant and instrumenting concentration, wages are found to be negatively affected by employer concentration, with elasticities of between -1.5% and -3%.

This paper introduces moral hazard into a general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms to study wage inequality between homogeneous workers. Optimal performance pay contracts yield non-degenerate wage distributions among co-workers, enabling the analysis of two conceptually distinct and empirically relevant dimensions of wage dispersion: between-firm and within-firm inequality. The latter remains virtually unexplored in the literature. As an application, I characterize analytically the impact of trade liberalization on within-firm inequality, highlighting a new channel through which international trade can contribute to residual wage dispersion. To motivate the theory, I show that the model is consistent with cross-firm empirical patterns in residual wage dispersion and performance pay using nationally representative, matched employer–employee data from Canada.

The extent to which employers share rents with their employees is typically assessed by estimating the responsiveness of workers’ wages on firms’ ability to pay. This paper compares rent-sharing estimates using such a wage determination regression with estimates based on a productivity regression that relies on standard firm-level input and output data. Using a large matched firm-worker panel data sample for French manufacturing, we find that the respective industry distributions of the rent-sharing estimates are correlated and slightly overlap, but are significantly different on average. Precisely, if we only rely on the firm-level information, we obtain an average rent-sharing estimate of roughly 0.30 for the productivity regression and 0.17 for the wage determination regression. When we also take advantage of the worker-level information to control for unobserved worker ability in the model of wage determination, we find as expected a lower average value of 0.10.

Empirical studies of the impact of changes in ownership of manufacturing plants on productivity (e.g., Lichtenberg and Siegel (1987, 1990a, 1990b), McGuckin and Nguyen (1995, 2001), and Maksimovic and Phillips (2001)) have provided limited evidence on how such transactions affect investment in human capital and have been based strictly on U.S. and U.K. data. We attempt to fill these gaps, based on an analysis of matched employer-employee data from over 19,000 Swedish manufacturing plants for the years 1985-1998. The sample covers virtually the entire population of manufacturing plants with 20 or more employees and a probability-based sample of smaller plants. We assess whether there are differential effects on productivity and human capital for different types of ownership changes, such as partial and full acquisitions and divestitures, and related and unrelated acquisitions. Our results suggest that ownership change results in an increase in relative productivity. We also find that plants involved in these transactions experience increases in average employee age, experience, and the percentage of employees with a college education. Ownership change also leads to an increase in wages and a reduction in the percentage of female workers. All of these patterns emerge most strongly for full acquisitions and divestitures and unrelated acquisitions.

We develop an empirical search-matching model which is suitable for analyzing the wage, employment and welfare impact of regulation in a labor market with heterogeneous workers and jobs. To achieve this we develop an equilibrium model of wage determination and employment which extends the current literature on equilibrium wage determination with matching and provides a bridge between some of the most prominent macro models and microeconometric research. The model incorporates productivity shocks, long-term contracts, on-the-job search and counter-offers. Importantly, the model allows for the possibility of assortative matching between workers and jobs due to complementarities between worker and job characteristics. We use the model to estimate the potential gain from optimal regulation and we consider the potential gains and redistributive impacts from optimal unemployment insurance policy. Here optimal policy is defined as that which maximizes total output and home production, accounting for the various constraints that arise from search frictions. The model is estimated on the NLSY using the method of moments.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the role wage dispersion across establishments has played in recent increases in total wage inequality in Germany and compares it to inequality changes at the individual level. It is queried whether the contribution of establishment heterogeneity to the rise of wage inequality stems from changes of institutional settings or from structures such as establishment size and the composition of the workforce. Design/methodology/approach – Applying regression-based decompositions of variance to German linked employer-employee panel data for the years 2000-2010 it is analysed to what extent changes associated to firm structures contribute to the rise of total wage inequality. Findings – Results show that the rise in wage inequality in Germany to a great extent is associated to rising wage variance across establishments, implying that establishment specific wage premiums have grown. By further decomposing across firm components of wage inequality, it is found that changes in across establishment wage inequality related to collective bargaining, worker co-determination and internal labour markets together account for about 3 per cent of the rise in total inequality. Inequality changes related to establishments’ skill and occupational composition account for about 11 per cent and establishment size alone accounts for about 18 per cent of the rise in total inequality. Originality/value – The main contribution is to quantify the relation of specific establishment characteristics to the rise in total wage inequality over time. Conclusions are drawn about the importance of mechanisms of rent sharing at the firm level in comparison to the determination of wages by individual qualification.

We propose a simple test that uses information on workers' mobility, wages and firms' profits to identify the sign and strength of assortative matching. The basic intuition underlying our empirical strategy is that, in the presence of positive (negative) assortative matching, good workers are more (less) likely to move to better firms than bad workers. Assuming that agents' payoffs are increasing in their own types, our test exploits within-firm variation on wages to rank workers by their types and firm profits to rank firms. We use a panel data set that combines social security earnings records for workers in the Veneto region of Italy with detailed balance-sheet data for firms. We find robust evidence that positive assortative matching is pervasive in the labor market. This result is in contrast with what we find from correlating the worker and firm fixed effects in standard Mincerian wage equations.

A growing body of research shows that firms' employment and wage-setting policies contribute to wage inequality and pay disparities between groups. We measure the effects of these policies on racial pay differences in Brazil. We find that nonwhites are less likely to work at establishments that pay more to all race groups, a pattern that explains about 20% of the white-nonwhite wage gap for both genders. The pay premiums offered by different employers are also compressed for nonwhites relative to whites, contributing another 5% of the overall gap. We then ask how much of the under-representation of nonwhites at higher-paying workplaces is due to the selective skill mix at these establishments. Using a counterfactual based on the observed skill distribution at each establishment and the nonwhite shares in different skill groups in the local labor market, we conclude that assortative matching accounts for about two-thirds of the under-representation gap for both men and women. The remainder reflects an unexplained preference for white workers at higher-paying establishments. The wage losses associated with unexplained sorting and differential wage setting are largest for nonwhites with the highest levels of general skills, suggesting that the allocative costs of race-based preferences may be relatively large in Brazil.

The paper proposes a model of on- and off-the-job search that combines convex hiring costs and directed search. Firms permanently differ in productivity levels, their production function features constant or decreasing returns to scale, and search costs are convex in search intensity. Wages are determined in a competitive manner, as firms advertise wage contracts (expected discounted incomes) so as to balance wage costs and search costs (queue length). An important assumption is that a firm is able to sort out its coordination problems with their employees in such a way that the on-the-job search behavior of workers maximizes the match surplus. Our model has several interesting features. First, it is close in spirit to the competitive model, with a tractable and unique equilibrium, and is therefore useful for empirical testing. Second, the resulting equilibrium gives rise to an efficient allocation of resources. Third, the equilibrium is characterized by a job ladder: unemployed workers search for low-productivity, low-wage firms. Workers in low-wage firms search for firms slightly higher on the productivity/ ladder, and so forth up to the workers in the second most productive firms who only apply to the most productive firms. Finally, the model rationalizes empirical regularities of on-the-job search and labor turnover. First, job-to job mobility falls with average firm tenure and firm size. Second, wages increase with firm size, and wage growth is larger in fast-growing firms.

This paper builds, identifies and estimates a model of the labor market that features strategic interactions in wage setting and two-sided heterogeneity in order to shed light on the sources of wage inequality. We provide a tractable characterization of the model equilibrium and demonstrate its existence and uniqueness. This characterization of the equilibrium allows us to derive a rich set of comparative statics and to gauge the relative contributions of worker skill, preference for amenities and strategic interactions to equilibrium wage inequality. Using instrumental variables, we establish identification of labor demand and supply parameters and estimate them using matched employer-employee data from Denmark. Using our estimated structural model, we perform a series of counterfactual analyses in order to provide a quantitative evaluation of the main sources of wage inequality in Denmark.

This article provides evidence of rent sharing from orthogonal directions by exploiting different dimensions in the same data. Taking advantage of a rich matched employer-employee dataset for France over the period 1984-2001, we consistently compare across-industry heterogeneity in rent-sharing parameters derived from three different approaches. The accounting approach and the standard labor economics approach are compatible with distinct labor bargaining settings (right-to-manage, efficient bargaining, labor hoarding) whereas the productivity approach hinges on the assumption of efficient bargaining. Across the different approaches, we evidently find differences in dispersion of the rent-sharing parameter estimates which could be attributable to differences in modeling assumptions and/or data requirements but these estimates lie within a comparable range. We interpret the latter finding as lending empirical support to efficient bargaining as the nature of the bargaining process in France over the considered period.

This article estimates the importance of workers’ outside options in wage determination. The article uses the predictions of search and bargaining theory and proposes novel identification strategies to separate the respective effects of outside options from those of unobserved productivity. Using an administrative panel database for Germany, this study exploits differences in both the employment composition across cities of Germany and mobility across jobs as sources of variation for identification. The main finding of the article is that a 10% increase in the outside options of a worker generates a 7% wage increase.

This paper builds a general equilibrium framework with firm and worker heterogeneity, monopsony power, and task-based production to quantify the long-run effects of education, biased demand shocks, and minimum wage.I take it to Brazilian data for 1998 and 2012 and find that (i) supply and demand shocks increase sorting of high-wage workers to high-wage firms, (ii) increased entry of high-wage firms boosts the effect of rising schooling attainment on mean log wages by 25%, and (iii) the minimum wage reduces formal wage inequality but also causes wage loss for mid-productivity workers and disemployment for those at the very bottom.

Do firms in China share rents with their workers? We address this question by examining firm-level panel data covering virtually all manufacturing firms over the period 2000-2007, representing an average of 200,000 firms and 54 million workers per year. We find robust evidence of rent sharing (RS): workers that would move from low- to high-profit firms would see their wages increase by about 45%. The results are based on multiple instrumental variables, including firm-specific international trade shocks. We also present a number of complementary findings that allow us to understand better the nature of RS in the country: RS is weaker in firms with more women and less educated workers; RS involves an element of risk sharing, as wages also decrease when profits fall; RS is lower in regions with more latent competition from rural workers; higher minimum wages tend to reduce RS; and, while employer labour market power reduces wages, it increases RS. Overall, despite its importance, RS in China is smaller and more symmetric than in developed economies, which reflects the weaker bargaining power of its workers and the different scope of its labour market institutions.

The ''fractal'' nature of the rise in earnings dispersion is one of its key features and remains a puzzle. In this paper, we offer a new perspective on the causes of changes in earnings dispersion, focusing on the role of labour reallocation. Once we drop the assumption that all firms pay a given worker the same, the allocation of workers to firms matters for the dispersion of earnings. This perspective highlights two new factors that can affect the dispersion of earnings: rates of job and worker reallocation, and the nature of the process allocating workers to jobs. We set out a framework capturing this idea and quantify the impact of reallocation on earnings dispersion, using a dataset that comprises almost the universe of workers and the universe of employers in Maryland. We show that these factors have potentially large effects in general on earnings dispersion. In the case of Maryland over the period 1985-1994, the changing allocation of workers to jobs played a significant role in explaining movements in the dispersion of earnings.

This study exploits longitudinal employer–employee matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau to investigate the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to changes in earnings inequality within and across industries between 1992 and 2003. We find that factors that cannot be measured using standard cross‐sectional data, including the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers across firms, are important sources of changes in earnings distributions over time. Our results also suggest that the dynamics driving changes in earnings inequality are heterogeneous across industries.

We contribute a theory in which three channels interact to determine the degree of monopsony power and therefore the wedge between a worker's spot wage and her marginal product (henceforth, the wage markdown): (1) heterogeneity in worker-firm-specific preferences (nonwage amenities), (2) firm granularity, and (3) off-and on-the-job search frictions.We use Norwegian data to discipline each channel and then reproduce novel reduced-form empirical relationships between market concentration, job flows, wages and wage inequality.Our main exercise quantifies the contribution of each channel to income inequality and wage markdowns.The markdowns are 21 percent in our baseline estimation.Removing nonwage amenity dispersion narrows them by a third.Giving the next-lowest-ranked competitor a seat at the bargaining table narrows them by half.Removing search frictions narrows them by two-thirds.Each counterfactual shows decreased wage inequality and increased welfare.

Although a growing body of literature identifies the within-firm redistribution effects of trade, research on the adjustment processes in within-firm labor markets remains scarce. This study analyzes the within-firm adjustment of working hours and wages by considering workers’ educational background and gender in response to a change in offshoring. Matched worker–firm panel data in the Japanese manufacturing sector covering 1998 to 2014 are used. The analysis leads to the following three observations. First, offshoring does not significantly alter the skill premium and gender gap in terms of scheduled monthly salaries and scheduled hourly wages. Second, offshoring decreases skill premium in annual hourly wages, whereas it increases gender gap in annual salaries. Third, this uneven impact on annual variables arises from the different changes in overtime working hours: college graduates work longer with a lower overtime premium, whereas female workers do not increase overtime work.

We set up a trade model with heterogeneous firms and a worker population that is heterogeneous in two dimensions: workers are either skilled or unskilled, and within each skill category there is a continuum of abilities. Workers with high abilities, both skilled and unskilled, are matched to firms with high productivities, and this leads to wage differentials within each skill category across firms. Self-selection of the most productive firms into exporting generates an exporter wage premium, and our framework with skilled and unskilled workers allows us to decompose this premium into its skill-specific components. We employ linked employer-employee data from Germany to structurally estimate the parameters of the model. Using these parameter estimates, we compute an average exporter wage premium of 5 percent. The decomposition by skill turns out to be quantitatively highly relevant, with exporting firms paying no wage premium at all to their unskilled workers, while the premium for skilled workers is 12 percent.

Unobserved Individual and Firm Heterogeneity in Wage and Tenure Functions: Evidence from German Linked Employer-Employee Data We estimate wage and job tenure functions that include individual and firm effects capturing time-invariant unobserved worker and firm heterogeneity using German linked employeremployee data (LIAB data set). We find that both types of heterogeneity are correlated to the observed characteristics and that it is therefore warranted to include individual and firm fixed effects in both the wage and the job tenure equation. We look into the correlation of the unobserved heterogeneity components with each other. We find that high-wage workers tend to be low-tenure workers, i.e. higher unobserved ability seems to be associated with higher job mobility. At firm level, there seems to be a trade-off between wages and job stability: High-wage firms tend to be low-tenure firms, which suggests that low job stability may be compensated by higher wages. High-wage workers seem to sort into low-wage/high-tenure firms. They seem to forgo some of their earnings potential in favour of higher job stability. JEL Classification: C23, J31, J62, J63

The evolution of rent sharing is studied. Based on a panel of the top 300 publicly quoted British companies over 35 years and using excess stock market returns to patenting activity as an instrument for economic rents, the paper reports evidence of a significant fall over time in the pass-through from rents to wages. It confirms that wages do respond to firm-level shocks to economic rents, but by significantly less after 2000 than during the 1980s and 1990s. The evidence of decline is robust, corroborated with alternative instruments and industry-level analysis for the United States and the European Union.

This paper provides evidence from the US and Denmark that managers with a business degree (“business managers”) reduce their employees’ wages. Within five years of the appointment of a business manager, wages decline by 6% and the labor share by 5 percentage points in the US, and by 3% and 3 percentage points in Denmark. Firms appointing business managers are not on differential trends and do not enjoy higher output, investment, or employment growth thereafter. Using manager retirements and deaths and an IV strategy based on the diffusion of the practice of appointing business managers within industry, region and size quartile cells, we provide additional evidence that these are causal effects. We establish that the proximate cause of these (relative) wage effects are changes in rent-sharing practices following the appointment of business managers. Exploiting exogenous export demand shocks, we show that non-business managers share profits with their workers, whereas business managers do not. But consistent with our first set of results, these business managers show no greater ability to increase sales or profits in response to exporting opportunities. Finally, we use the influence of role models on college major choice to instrument for the decision to enroll in a business degree in Denmark and show that our estimates correspond to causal effects of practices and values acquired in business education—rather than the differential selection into business education of individuals unlikely to share rents with workers. This figure plots event-study estimates and 95% confidence intervals separately for workers who are union members and workers who are not union members, where events are manager transitions from a non-business manager to a business manager in Denmark. The dependent variable is log annual wage. Standard errors are clustered at the firm level. This figure plots event-study estimates and 95% confidence intervals, where events are manager transitions from a non-business manager to a business manager in Denmark. The regression controls for firm fixed effects, initial size quintile by year fixed effects, region × year fixed effects and industry × year fixed effects, and observations are weighted by firm employment. The dependent variable is the share of workers at the firm who are union members. Standard errors are clustered at the firm level. This figure plots event-study estimates and 95% confidence intervals, where events are manager transitions from a non-business manager to a business manager in Denmark. The sample includes firms that have non-business managers in all years, and firms that have one non-business to business manager transition event during the sample period. All regressions control for firm fixed effects, initial size quintile by year fixed effects, region × year fixed effects, industry × year fixed effects, firm × worker fixed effects, quadratic in experience, and union and marital status dummies. The dependent variable is the value of stock option payments. Standard errors are clustered at the firm level. This figure plots event-study estimates and 95% confidence intervals, where events are placebo manager transitions from a non-business manager to a non-business manager in Denmark. The dependent variable is the share of workers that quit the firm to join another firm or become unemployed in the following year. All regressions include firm fixed effects, industry × year fixed effects, state(region) × year fixed effects, and initial size quintile by year fixed effects, and observations are weighted by employment. Standard errors are clustered at the firm level.

This study estimates the effect of import competition in the final goods market on workers’ wages in the Japanese manufacturing sector by constructing a panel of matched worker–firm data for 1998–2013 wages. The baseline results show that import competition does not decrease unskilled workers’ wages and increases the skill premia of workers with college degrees or those in managerial and professional positions. Large firms and firms with low productivity also increased their wage premia through import competition, but the degree of increase due to firm-level factors is much smaller than that due to factors related to workers’ skill.

Abstract We study how the wage gap between exporting and non‐exporting firms (export wage premium) differs across skill groups, using unique matched employer–employee data from China. We find robust evidence that exporters pay relatively higher wages than non‐exporters to more educated workers. The differences in export wage premium across education groups are sizable. Further investigations show that the positive correlation between export wage premium and education is more pronounced in sectors with higher scope for quality differentiation. This is consistent with the theory that exporters produce relatively higher quality goods which require relatively higher quality skilled workers.

This paper develops a model of costly trade and team production to examine the matching behavior of skilled workers in an open economy. Trade liberalization leads to a redistribution of rents across firms that differ in export status. When heterogeneous workers can bargain effectively and capture these rents, trade liberalization changes the supply of skilled production teams available for hire. Trade is shown to rationalize the matching behavior of workers, causing skill-upgrading within firms and infra-marginal improvements to firm-level productivity. Gains in productivity via skill-upgrading are distinct, and complementary, to the gains realized as low productivity firms exit and high productivity firms expand. All firms experience changes in skill composition, rather than just those on the margin of exit or exporting. Openness benefits those employed at exporting firms, however the likelihood of benefiting from trade is not necessarily increasing in skill. Wages in the open economy are tied to both worker skill and job type.

An earlier version of this paper circulated under the title “Bargaining and the Gender Wage Gap: A Direct&#13;\nAssessment"

We contribute a theory in which three channels interact to determine the degree of monopsony power and therefore the markdown of a worker ’ s spot wage relative to her marginal product: (1) heterogeneity in worker-fi rm-speci fi c preferences (nonwage amenities), (2) fi rm granularity, and (3) off-and on-the-job search frictions. We use Norwegian data to discipline each channel and then reproduce new reduced-form empirical relationships between market concentration, job fl ows, wages and wage inequality. In doing so we provide a novel method for clustering occupations into local labor markets. Our main exercise quanti fi es the contribution of each channel to income inequality and wage markdowns. The average markdown is 21 percent in our baseline estimation. Removing nonwage amenity dispersion narrows them by a third. Giving the next-lowest-ranked competitor a seat at the bargaining table narrows them by half, suggesting that granularity and strategic interactions in the bar-gaining process is an important source of markdowns. Removing search frictions narrows them by two-thirds. Each counterfactual reduces wage inequality and increases welfare.

Il paper analizza gli effetti dell'offshoring di servizi sui salari dei lavoratori italiani. L'analisi si basa su un nuovo dataset costruito combinando due differenti fonti di informazioni: dati amministrativi rilasciati dall'Istituto Nazionale di Previdenza Sociale (INPS), che permettono di collegare i lavoratori ai rispettivi datori di lavoro (linked employer-employee data), e indicatori settoriali di offhsoring derivati dalle matrici Input-Output pubblicate dall'Istituto Nazionale di Statistica (ISTAT). L'analisi empirica si propone di valutare l'effetto dell'offshoring di servizi sui salari dei lavoratori italiani, controllando opportunamente per le caratteristiche rilevanti dei lavoratori, delle imprese e dei settori di appartenenza. L'analisi mostra che l'offshoring di servizi non ha causato riduzioni significative dei salari. Tuttavia, esso contribuisce ad ampliare la disuguaglianza salariale tra lavoratori maggiormente qualificati e lavoratori meno qualificati. Infine, si riscontrano effetti diversi secondo il tipo di servizi delocalizzati all'estero: l'offshoring di servizi professionali ha infatti effetti moderatamente negativi sui salari dei lavoratori, mentre l'esternalizzazione di altre tipologie di servizi mostra un impatto trascurabile.

Abstract Export activity shapes workers’ experience-wage profiles. Using employer-employee and customs data for Brazilian manufacturing, we document that workers’ experience-wage profiles are steeper at exporters than at non-exporters and, among exporters, steeper at exporters shipping to high-income destinations. We develop and quantify a model featuring worker-firm wage bargaining, export-market entry by multi-worker firms, and human capital accumulation by workers to interpret the data. Human capital growth can explain one-half of the differences in wage profiles between exporters and non-exporters. We show that increased human capital per worker can account for one-half of the overall gains in real income from trade openness.

IZA DP No. 14473 JUNE 2021 Differences in On-the-Job Learning across Firms We present evidence consistent with large disparities across firms in the on-the-job learning their young employees experience, using administrative datasets from Brazil and Italy. We categorize firms into discrete “classes” using a clustering methodology which groups together firms with similar distributions of unexplained earnings growth. Equipped with this categorization of firms—which our conceptual framework interprets as skill-learning classes—we document three main results. First, Mincerian returns to experience vary substantially across experiences acquired in different firm classes, and the magnitude of this heterogeneity is associated with significant shifts across the distribution of early-career wage growth. Second, past experience at firms with better on-the-job learning is associated with subsequent jobs featuring greater non-routine task content. Third, firms’ observable characteristics only mildly predict on-the-job learning opportunities. Our findings hold among involuntarily displaced workers who have no seniority at their new jobs, which is consistent with a portable skills interpretation. JEL Classification: J24, J31

Standard analysis of corporate income taxation assumes shareholders bear the burden of taxes on rents. But recent research finds that firms share rents with workers, implying that workers bear some of the burden. Using the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center microsimulation model, we show that rent sharing has significant implications for understanding corporate taxes. Allowing for rent sharing shifts the incidence of the tax, placing more burden on labor, but the progressivity implications depend crucially on which workers obtain rents. In the United States, where rents are shared disproportionately with high-income workers, the tax remains approximately as progressive as under standard assumptions.

We estimate the earnings losses of a cohort of workers displaced during the Great Recession and decompose those long-term losses into components attributable to fewer work hours and to reduced hourly wage rates. We also examine the extent to which the reduced earnings, work hours, and wages of these displaced workers can be attributed to factors specific to pre- and post-displacement employers; that is, to employer-specific fixed effects. The analysis is based on employer-employee linked panel data from Washington State assembled from 2002-2014 administrative wage and unemployment insurance (UI) records. Three main findings emerge from the empirical work. First, five years after job loss, the earnings of these displaced workers were 16 percent less than those of comparison groups of non-displaced workers. Second, earnings losses within a year of displacement can be explained almost entirely by lost work hours; however, five years after displacement, the relative earnings deficit of displaced workers can be attributed roughly 40 percent to reduced hourly wages and 60 percent to reduce work hours. Third for the average displaced worker, lost employer-specific premiums account for about 11 percent of long-term earnings losses and nearly 25 percent of lower long-term hourly wages. For workers displaced from employers paying top-quintile earnings premiums (about 60 percent of the displaced workers in the sample), lost employer-specific premiums account for more than half of long-term earnings losses and 83 percent of lower long-term hourly wages.

In this paper, we use a linked employer-employee database from Brazil to evaluate the wage effects of trade reform. With an aggregate (firm-level) analysis of this question, we find that a decline in trade protection is associated with an increase in average wages in exporting firms relative to domestic firms, consistent with earlier studies. However, using disaggregated, employer-employee level data, and allowing for the endogenous assignment of workers to firms due to match-specific productivity, we find that the premium paid to workers at exporting firms is economically and statistically insignificant, as is the differential impact of trade openness on the wages of workers at exporting firms relative to otherwise identical workers at domestic firms. We also find that workforce composition improves systematically in exporting firms, in terms of the combination of worker ability and the quality of worker-firm matches, post-liberalization. These results stand in stark contrast to the findings reported in many earlier studies and underscore the importance of endogenous matching and, more generally, non-random labor market allocation mechanisms, in determining the effects of trade policy changes on wages.

In the canonical competitive labor market model, firms are wage-takers and idiosyncratic shocks to individual firms do not affect wages. However, when labor markets are frictional, wages may directly depend on firm-specific factors. We test how sensitive wages are to firm-level labor demand by estimating the incidence of idiosyncratic export demand shocks on the wages of incumbent workers in Portugal during the Great Recession (2008-2010). Using detailed export records, we construct measures of firm exposure to unanticipated shocks to the demands of different countries for specific products. The shocks predict changes in output and payroll at affected firms, but not at other similar firms. We combine the export demand measures with firm balance sheet data and matched longitudinal administrative employer-employee records to estimate the impact of idiosyncratic firm-level demand shocks on employee outcomes. We find that idiosyncratic shocks that decreased sales or value added by 10 percent caused wages to grow 1.5 percent less for incumbent workers who were employed by affected firms in 2007. Furthermore, we find that these pass-through effects are stronger in industries with higher durability of employment relationships and lower employee turnover rates. These results support a model in which barriers to replacing incumbent workers give rise to internal labor markets within the firm, exposing workers to their employersâ idiosyncratic conditions.

Abstract Do more educated workers earn higher wages partly because they have access to high-paying firms and occupations? We rely on linked employer-employee data to combine the estimation of AKM models with the decomposition of the returns to schooling. We exploit exogenous variation in education driven by changes in compulsory education. We show that education provides access to better-paying workplaces and occupations: 30 percent of the overall return to education operates through the workplace channel and 12 percent through the occupation channel. The remainder is associated exclusively with the individual. Match quality plays a modest role in the returns to education.

I study the relationship between firm growth and the characteristics of newly hired workers. Using Census microdata I obtain a novel empirical result: when a given firm grows faster it hires workers with higher past wages. These results suggest that productive, fast-growing firms tend to hire more productive workers, a form of positive assortative matching. This contrasts with prior research that has found negligible or negative sorting between workers and firms. I present evidence that this difference arises because previous studies have focused on cross-sectional comparisons across firms and industries, while my results condition on firm characteristics (e.g. size, industry, or firm fixed effects). Motivated by the empirical findings I develop a search model with heterogeneous workers and firms. The model is the first to study worker-firm sorting in an environment with worker heterogeneity, firm productivity shocks, multi-worker firms, and search frictions. Despite this richness the model is tractable, allowing me to characterize assortative matching, compositional dynamics and other properties analytically. I show that the model reproduces the positive firm growth-quality of hires correlation when worker and firm types are strong complements in production (i.e. the production function is strictly log-supermodular).

We analyse an equilibrium labour market with on-the-job search and experience effects (where workers learn-by-doing). The analysis yields a standard Mincer wage equation with worker fixed effects and endogenously determined firm fixed effects. It shows that learning-by-doing increases equilibrium wage dispersion consistent with the data. Equilibrium sorting - where over time more experienced workers also tend to find and quit to better paid employment - has a significant impact on wage inequality. As the model yields a cross section distribution of wages paid with the 'right' structure (the density of wages paid is single peaked with a 'fat' Pareto right tail) and yields the 'right' time profile of worker wage outcomes (the initial 10 years of a worker's career are characterised by several job changes and rapid wage growth) it yields a new, coherent statistical structure for future applied work.

Recent research finds that pay inequality stems both from firm pay-setting and from workers’ individual characteristics. Yet, intergenerational mobility research remains focused on transmission of individual traits, and has failed to test how firms shape the inheritance of inequality. We study this question using three decades of Swedish population register data, and decompose the intergenerational earnings correlation into firm pay premiums and stable worker effects. One quarter of the intergenerational earnings correlation at midlife is explained by sorting between firms with unequal pay. Employer or industry inheritance account for a surprisingly small share of this firm-based earnings transmission. Instead, children from high-income backgrounds benefit from matching with high-paying firms irrespective of the sources of parents’ earnings advantage. Our analysis reveals how an imperfectly competitive labor market provides an opening for skill-based rewards in one generation to become class-based advantages in the next.

We study the time-series properties of firm effects in the two-way fixed effects models popularized by Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999) (AKM) using two approaches. The first—the rolling AKM approach (R-AKM)—estimates AKM models separately for successive two-year intervals. The second—the time-varying AKM approach (TV-AKM)—is an extension of the original AKM model that allows for unrestricted interactions of year and firm indicators. We apply to both approaches the leave-one-out methodology of Kline, Saggio and Solvsten (2019) to correct for biases in the resulting variance components. Using administrative wage records from Washington State, we find, first, that firm effects for hourly wage rates and earnings are highly persistent. Specifically, the autocorrelation coefficient between firm effects in 2002 and 2014 is 0.74 for wages and 0.82 for earnings. Second, the R-AKM approach uncovers cyclicality in firm effects and worker-firm sorting. During the Great Recession the variability in firm effects increased, while the degree of worker-firm sorting decreased. Third, we document an increase in wage dispersion between 2002–2003 and 2013–2014. This increase in wage dispersion is driven by increases in the variance of worker effects and sorting, with an accompanying decrease in the variance of firm wage effects. Auxiliary analyses suggest that the misspecification of standard AKM models resulting from restricting firm effects to be fixed over time is a second-order concern.

Social interaction with coworkers is common in the workplace. This paper explores how coworkers affect inequality through labor market sorting and on-thejob learning. Using matched employer-employee data from Italy, I first document two sets of empirical evidence by estimating an econometric model that incorporates coworkers in a wage regression with a novel estimation method. I find two main mechanisms through which coworkers affect wages: production complementarity and learning from coworkers. I also show that coworkers explain a substantial fraction of wage inequality, similar to that firm heterogeneity explains. To account for wage dynamics induced by these two channels and the subsequent impact on lifetime income inequality, I incorporate coworkers into a labor search model with worker and firm heterogeneity. I find that half of the lifetime income variation is explained by workers’ initial ability. Firm heterogeneity explains around 15 percent of the remaining unexplained part, while coworker production complementarity and learning contribute to another 15 percent and 30 percent, respectively.

Recent research finds that pay inequality stems both from firm pay-setting and from workers’ individual characteristics. Yet, intergenerational mobility research remains focused on transmission of individual traits, and has failed to test how firms shape the inheritance of inequality. We study this question using three decades of Swedish population register data, and decompose the intergenerational earnings correlation into firm pay premiums and stable worker effects. One quarter of the intergenerational earnings correlation at midlife is explained by sorting between firms with unequal pay. Employer or industry inheritance account for a surprisingly small share of this firm-based earnings transmission. Instead, children from high-income backgrounds benefit from matching with high-paying firms irrespective of the sources of parents’ earnings advantage. Our analysis reveals how an imperfectly competitive labor market provides an opening for skill-based rewards in one generation to become class-based advantages in the next.

We develop a life-cycle model of the labor market in which different worker-firm matches have different quality and the assignment of the right workers to the right firms is time consuming because of search and learning frictions. The rate at which workers move between unemployment, employment and across different firms is endogenous because search is directed and, hence, workers can choose whether to seek low-wage jobs that are easy to find or high-wage jobs that are hard to find. We calibrate our theory using data on labor market transitions aggregated across workers of different ages. We validate our theory by showing that it correctly predicts the pattern of labor market transitions for workers of different ages. Finally, we use our theory to decompose the age profiles of transition rates, wages and productivity into the effects of age variation in work-life expectancy, human capital and match quality.

If cited or quoted, reference should be made to the full name of the author(s), editor(s), the title, the

Rent-Sharing and the Cyclicality of Wage Differentials This paper investigates inter-industry wage differentials in Belgium, taking advantage of access to a unique matched employer-employee data set covering all the years from 1999 to 2005. Findings show the existence of large wage differentials among workers with the same observed characteristics and working conditions, employed in different sectors. These differentials are persistent and no particular downward or upward trend is observed. However, the dispersion of inter-industry wage differentials appears to show a cyclical pattern over time. Further results indicate that ceteris paribus, workers earn significantly higher wages when employed in more profitable firms. The time dimension of our matched employer-employee data allows us to instrument firms' profitability by its lagged value. The instrumented elasticity between wages and profits is found to be quite stable over time and varies between 0.034 and 0.043. It follows that Lester’s range of pay due to rent sharing fluctuates between about 24 and 37 percent of the mean wage. This rent-sharing phenomenon accounts for a large fraction of the industry wage differentials. We find indeed that the magnitude, dispersion and significance of industry wage differentials decreases sharply when controlling for profits. JEL Classification: D31, J31, J41

This paper analyzes the impact of workplace characteristics on individual wages based on a unique cross-section matched employer-employee dataset for the Israeli private manufacturing sector in 1995; especially, we examine the effects of the interaction between rent-sharing and wages on the gender wage gap. The empirical findings show that individual compensation is significantly and positively related to firms' profits-per-employee even when controlling for group effects in the residuals, individual and firms' characteristics, industry wage differentials and endogeneity of profits. Wage-profit elasticity is found to be 14 percent and it is insignificantly different between genders. With respect to the overall gender wage gap (on average women earn 28 percent less than men), the results show that within firms there is no gender discrimination and that 12 percent of this gap can be explained by the wage-profits profile and by the fact that women are more likely to be employed in less profitable firms than men.

We study the extent to which firm financial performance is passed on to workers in the form of higher wages and the degree to which this pass-through has changed over the period 2002- 2018. We use both value added per worker and a measure of quasi-rents as measures of financial performance. Value added per worker is the standard measure used internationally. Quasi-rents better approximate the resources available to be shared between workers and firms as it takes into account the rental cost of capital as well as the reservation wages of workers. We estimate the reservation wage bill for each firm using estimates from a two-way fixed-effect model. We estimate models similar to those typically used in the international literature and further decompose the estimated pass-through into the contribution from worker sorting and the contribution from rent-sharing. Our instrumental variables estimates of pass-through are in the range of 0.12 and 0.19 for value added and 0.11 and 0.07 for quasi-rents. Worker sorting explains between 35% and 50% of pass-through. While the extent of overall pass-through is relatively stable over time, the contribution of worker sorting declines dramatically to explain almost none of the estimated pass-through. We contribute to the literature by demonstrating a method to calculate quasi-rents, by testing for changes over time in pass-through, and examining the relative importance of worker sorting over time.

The objective of this paper is to construct and quantitatively assess an equilibrium search model with on-the-job search and general human capital accumulation. In the model workers enter the labour market with different abilities and firms differ in their productivities. Wages are dispersed because of search frictions and workers' productivity differentials. The model generates a simple (log) wage variance decomposition that is used to measure the importance of firm and worker productivity differentials, frictional wage dispersion and workers' sorting dynamics. I calibrate the model using a sample of young workers for the UK. I show that wage inequality among low skilled workers is mostly due to differences in their productivities. Among medium skilled workers frictional wage dispersion and sorting dynamics are, together, as important as workers' productivity differentials. Differences in firms' productivities are also an important source of wage inequality for both skill groups and account for a large share of frictional wage dispersion. Quantitatively the model is able to reproduce the observed cross-sectional wage distribution, the average wage-experience profile and the amount of frictional wage dispersion observed in the data as measured by the Mean-min ratio.

We develop a tractable model of monopsony power based on information frictions in job search. Workers and firms choose probabilistic search strategies, with information costs limiting how precisely they can target matches. Firms post wages strategically, anticipating application behavior and exploiting a first-mover advantage. The model nests both directed and random search as limiting cases and yields a closed-form wage equation that shows the effects on wage-setting power of search frictions, labor market tightness and sorting. Wage markdowns in equilibrium arise not only from limited labor supply elasticity but also from sorting patterns and demand-side frictions. In highly assortative environments, the absence of wage competition allows firms to capture nearly the full surplus, even when labor supply is elastic. Numerical results replicate markdowns of 30-40% and suggest that constrained-efficient wages would be approximately 20% higher. Our framework unifies the analysis of monopsony, sorting and wage posting, and provides a computationally efficient method for evaluating directed search equilibria.

Studies of individual wage dynamics typically ignore firm heterogeneity, whereas decompositions of earnings into worker and firm effects abstract from life-cycle considerations. We study firm effects in individual wage dynamics using administrative data on the population of Italian employers and employees. We propose a novel identification strategy for firm-related wage components exploiting the informative content of the wage covariance structure of coworkers. Wage inequality increases three-fold over the working life; firm effects are predominant while young, but sorting of workers into firms becomes increasingly important, explaining the largest share of lifetime inequality. Static models that do not allow for life-cycle dynamics underestimate the importance of sorting and overstate match and firm effects.

Foreign-acquired firms pay higher wages. The wage gap may arise with worker composition (e.g., sorting of high-quality workers) or firm-level premia (e.g., productivity improvements). We propose a dynamic decomposition on The Netherlands’ universal employer–employee data to understand the drivers of the post-acquisition wage gap. The wage gap rises from 1% to 5% after the acquisition, and firm level premia account for roughly three-quarters of the gap. The contribution of the workforce composition is initially absent, but grows to one-fifth of the wage gap, driven solely by new hires. Firm-level premia associate with higher management pay, worker training, and firms’ internationalization strategies. We show how the implied relative importance of worker sorting and firm-level development varies with assumptions on the counterfactual of the acquisition.

We quantify firm heterogeneity in skill returns and present direct evidence of worker–firm complementarities. Within a model of firms' demand for cognitive and noncognitive attributes we show that identification depends on the availability of skill measures. Linking administrative data to test scores we document worker sorting and convex earnings–skill relationships. We find that: (1) Both skills' returns vary substantially across employers and correlate weakly within-firm. (2) Workers with large endowments of a skill populate firms with higher returns to it. Sorting intensifies with the cross-sectional dispersion of returns. (3) Complementarities and sorting significantly influence the earnings distribution.

We study the nature of firm pay dynamics. To this end, we propose a statistical model that extends the seminal framework by Abowd, We estimate the model using linked employeremployee data for Sweden from 1985 to 2016. By drawing on detailed firm financials data, we show that firms that become more productive and accumulate capital raise pay, whereas firms lower pay as they add workers. A secular increase in firm-year pay dispersion in Sweden since 1985 is accounted for by greater persistence of firm pay among incumbent firms as well as greater dispersion in firm pay among entrant firms, as opposed to more volatile firm pay.

We quantify the importance of imperfect competition in the U.S. labor market by estimating the size of labor market rents earned by American firms andworkers. We construct a matched employer-employee panel data set by combining the universe of U.S. business and worker tax records for the period 2001-2015. Using this panel data, we identify and estimate an equilibrium model of the labor market with two-sided heterogeneity where workers view firms as imperfect substitutes because of heterogeneous preferences over non-wage job characteristics. The model allows us to draw inference about imperfect competition, worker sorting, compensating differentials, and rent sharing.<br>

This paper uses U.S. Census Bureau panel data that link firm software investment to worker earnings. We regress the log of earnings of workers by age group on the software investment by their employing firm. To unpack the potential causal factors for differential software effects by age group we extend the AKM framework by including job-spell fixed effects that allow for a correlation between the worker-firm match and age and by including time-varying firm effects that allow for a correlation between wage-enhancing productivity shocks and software investments. Within job-spell, software capital raises earnings at a rate that declines post age 50 to about zero after age 65. By contrast, the effects of non-IT equipment investment on earnings increase for workers post age 50. The difference between the software and non-IT equipment effects suggests that our results are attributable to the technology rather than to age-related bargaining power. Our data further show that software capital increases the earnings of high-wage workers relative to low-wage workers and the earnings in high-wage firms relative to low-wage firms, and may thus widen earnings inequality within and across firms.

In the canonical random on-the-job search model with continuous firm heterogeneity, I show that a mean-preserving spread of the firm-productivity distribution raises the returns to mobility, i.e., the inter-firm mobility of workers as measured by the number of outside contacts per employment spell. Both sorting and rent-share mechanisms play a role. In a further contribution, I distinguish frictional and structural impediments to mobility in order to establish a link between mobility and skills via the concept of versatility. Versatility enhances a person’s mobility since a mismatch between job requirements and the person’s skill set is less likely to occur. I provide some statistics in support of the discussed mechanisms. The findings are particularly intriguing in light of the concurrent rise in the productivity dispersion across firms and in the skill premium in many countries.

Jan M. Podivinsky: This paper is motivated by earlier research on the effect of increased import competition in final goods markets upon domestic employment and wages. Although much of this research points to negative effects of import competition on wages, there is some evidence of a positive effect upon firms’ productivity, potentially increasing wages for these firms’ workers. Much of this evidence is based on worker-level panel data, in a range of developed and developing countries. The notable exception is Japan, where such worker-level panel data do not exist because government surveys do not contain worker identification information.Endoh addresses this exception and provides a significant addition to this literature, by first constructing a viable matched worker-firm panel for Japan, and then using this panel to provide the first evidence for the effects of import competition in final goods markets upon wages in Japan.Endoh approaches the construction of a matched worker-firm data set for Japan in a careful and coherent manner. He constructs an unbalanced panel for the period 1998–2013, where the panel variable is the firm, not the worker, by using two different surveys linked by two censuses. This is a significant achievement in itself, yielding a substantial data set (when restricted to the private sector manufacturing focus of this paper) of around 1.2 million worker-firm-year observations and about 49,000 firm-year observations. The assumptions underlying the construction of this panel data set are carefully set out. Figure 1 is an exceptionally clear and concise summary of the principles underlying the construction of the matched worker-firm panel. This constructed data set should be a valuable resource for further research on Japan, particularly if its coverage were to be extended beyond the manufacturing sector.The use of this data set in addressing the research question of the effect of import competition in final goods markets upon workers’ wages in Japan follows the now standard methodology (see Hummels et al. 2014) of estimating a Mincerian wage equation. This allows for both worker-level dummies (including age, gender, and skills level) and firm-level dummies (including sales, and number of workers), their interactions with indexes of import competition, and fixed effects (FE). Endoh wisely considers three alternative measures of (log) wages: scheduled monthly wages (thus typically excluding overtime payments, etc.), monthly wages, and annual income, and comments on the comparison of the results for these alternative wage definitions.Of particular importance is Endoh's recognition of the possible endogeneity between the import competition index and the firm-level variable. He uses a world supply index of total export supply (with the exception of exports to Japan) as a plausible instrumental variable (IV), backed up by large Cragg-Donald F-statistics. In presenting and commenting upon the empirical results, Endoh prefers the alternative wage specifications estimated by FE-IV. The results suggest that import competition does not decrease unskilled worker’ wages, and increases the wage premium for workers with higher levels of skills (measured by those with at least college degrees or those in professional/managerial positions). These results are fairly consistent across the alternative wage definitions, as well as Endoh's robustness checks (excluding firm-level variable to counter possible endogeneity of import competition; and regional difference in import competition).In summary, Endoh's results on Japanese manufacturing provides a valuable contribution to the empirical literature. He sets out anticipated further research that will build upon both this paper and the panel data set he has carefully constructed, and I look forward to his important future contributions.

We use French employer-employee data for the manufacturing sector from 2005 to 2015 to reassess the wage gap between native and foreign workers. In line with previous evidence, we find that immigrants earn less than natives, white-collar workers earn more than blue-collar workers, and exporters pay higher wages. In a new contribution to this literature, we find that the immigrant wage gap varies with the export intensity of the firm and the occupational group of the worker. We present a theoretical model with heterogeneous firms and workers to show that our findings are consistent with white-collar immigrant workers capturing an informational rent, as they provide exporters with valuable information for accessing foreign markets. We provide evidence for this mechanism. First, we analyse how the immigrant wage gap varies with the complexity of the firm export activity. Second, we study how the average wage of immigrant workers from different origin groups varies with the export activity of the employing firm in those same origin regions. Sniekers, and Teodora Tsankova for their constructive remarks on the different versions of the paper. We thank the participants to the 2018 SAW workshop, MIDI Seminar at INED, 2018 Aarhus-Kiel Workshop, 2019 SAW project workshop, IELM seminar at Paris 1, IHEID BBL seminar, AFSE 2021, ETSG 2021, 11th conference on the Economics of Global Interactions, and FIND seminar for useful discussions and comments. Declarations

Empirical labor economists have resorted to estimating the responsiveness of workers' wages on firms' ability to pay to assess the extent to which employers share rents with their employees. This paper compares this labor economics approach with two other approaches that rely on standard micro production data only: the productivity approach for which estimates of the output elasticities of labor and materials and data on the respective revenue shares are needed and the accounting approach which boils down to directly computing the extent of rent sharing from firm accounting information. Using matched employer-employee data on 60,294 employees working in 9,849 firms over the period 1984-2001 in France, we quantify industry differences in rent-sharing parameters derived from the three approaches. We find a median absolute extent of rent sharing of about 0.30 using either the productivity or the accounting approach. Only exploiting firm-level information brings this median rent-sharing parameter down to 0.16 using the labor economics approach. Controlling for unobserved worker ability further reduces the median absolute extent of rent sharing to 0.08. Our analysis makes clear that the three different approaches face important trade-offs. Hence, empirical economists interested in establishing that profits are shared should select the appropriate approach based on the particular research question and on the data at hand.

Labor market theories allowing for search frictions make marked predictions on the effect of the degree of frictions on wages. Often, the effect is predicted to be negative. Despite the popularity of these theories, this has never been tested. We perform tests with matched worker-firm data. The worker data are informative on individual wages and labor market transitions, and this allows for estimation of the degree of search frictions. The firm data are\ninformative on labor productivity. The matched data provide the skill composition in different markets. Together this allows us to investigate how the mean difference between labor productivity and wages in a market depends on the degree of frictions and other determinants. We correct for worker self-selection into high-wage jobs. Using within-market variation, we also investigate the extent of (and explanations for) positive assortative\nmatching.

This paper studies implicit pricing of non-wage job characteristics in the labor market using a two-sided matching model. It departs from the previous literature by allowing worker heterogeneity in productivity, which gives rise to a double transaction problem in a hedonic model. Deriving sufficient conditions under which assortative matching is the unique stable job-worker matching, we show that observed wage differentials between jobs reflect not only compensating wage differentials, but also worker productivity gaps between the jobs. We find that the job-worker matching pattern determines the extent to which compensating wage differentials are confounded with the worker productivity gap effect.

This paper introduces a framework to study the impact of trade liberalization on wage inequality and welfare in the presence of monopsonistic labor markets. The interaction of firm heterogeneity in productivity with idiosyncratic preferences of workers for working at different firms generates between-firm wage inequality for workers with identical skills. The degree of monopsony power is captured by the elasticity of firm-level labor supply, with a lower elasticity implying more wage-setting power by the firm. With more productive firms paying higher wages, monopsony power dampens the impact of firm heterogeneity on the allocation of market shares and allows lower productivity firms to survive. In a closed economy this increases inequality, but in an open economy high levels of monopsony power inhibit exporting, which may reduce inequality by compressing wages on the right side of the distribution. Nevertheless, inequality in the open economy is always higher than in autarky. Monopsony power reduces social welfare (for empirically plausible values of the labor supply elasticity) and the gains from trade.

We show that the exporter wage gap is driven by workers sorting on comparative advantage rather than firm selection. We start out with an AKM-style wage equation with worker, firm, and residual “match” fixed effects. We show that allowing worker and firm effects to depend on the export status of the firm changes how the exporter wage gap is decomposed. Our results suggest that workers in exporting firms have unobserved traits that are particularly valuable in exporting, resulting in higher wages for workers in those firms. Further, we show that workers make job transitions based on their differential returns. Thus, the exporter wage gap results from workers self-selecting into exporting and non-exporting firms based on their comparative advantage. Finally, we show that the conclusion is robust to relaxing the linearity assumptions of the AKM-style framework. • Exporters Pay Higher Wages : Exporting firms generally pay higher wages than non-exporting firms. • Decomposition of Wage Gap : Worker effects are important drivers of the gap. • Comparative Advantage : Workers in exporting firms have skills that exporting firms reward. • Worker Sorting : Mobility and self-selection into exporting firms drive wage disparity. • Importance of Worker Heterogeneity : Worker differences matter – trade models should acknowledge this.

High-tenure workers who lose their jobs experience a large and prolonged fall in wages and earnings. To quantify the forces behind this empirical regularity, we propose a rich structural model of the labor market with heterogeneous firms, on-the-job search, and firm-specific and general human capital. By jointly matching moments of workers’ mobility and wages, the model can replicate the losses in earnings and wages observed in the data. The loss of a job with a more productive employer is the primary driver of the cumulated wage losses post-displacement (50 percent), followed by the loss of firm-specific human capital (30 percent).

We study the role of job transitions and firm pay policies in the Black-White earnings gap in the US.We use administrative data for the universe of employer-employee matches from 2005-2019 to analyze worker mobility in a general but tractable framework, which allows for firm effects that depend on workers' job history.Using differences in average pay between origin and destination firms as the treatment intensity of a job move, we analyze transitions up and down the job ladder and estimate race-specific passthrough rates of average firm pay into a mover's own earnings.First, we find race-specific asymmetry around the direction of the move, whereby losses experienced in downward transitions are meaningfully larger than gains from upward transitions with a similar treatment intensity.For a $1 earnings increase in transitions up the job ladder, earnings passthroughs in transitions down the job ladder impose an earnings loss of $1.25 among White workers and $1.50 among Black workers.Second, we uncover career setbacks as a novel pathway in the evolution of racial earnings gaps.In transitions down the job ladder, Black workers lose an additional $0.24 for every $1 decrease in White workers' earnings, a finding which prevails across sex and age.This "racial penalty" is not driven by differential pay, as it is completely absent when Black and White workers move between the same firm pairs.Instead, the penalty is due to differential sorting following career setbacks, so that Black workers regain employment in "worse" jobs, with strong evidence for racial differences in access to short-run liquidity as a mechanism.Overall, our findings offer a robust and computationally simple framework for modeling earnings determination processes and have implications for safety-net policies in the American labor market.

Using matched employer–employee data from Türkiye’s Entrepreneurship Information System (EIS) covering 2006–2022, this study documents a broad and sustained decline in wage inequality between 2006 and 2017, driven mainly by shrinking between-firm dispersion among large enterprises, followed by a mild reversal thereafter. Variance decompositions by firm size and sector show that compression was concentrated among firms with 250 or more employees, where inter-firm pay gaps narrowed sharply—particularly in manufacturing, which alone accounts for nearly 70 percent of the total reduction in wage variance. While the 2016 minimum-wage hike temporarily accelerated compression, its effects proved short-lived; the long-term trend reflects structural convergence among firms rather than transitory policy shocks. Distributional evidence shows that the upper-tail gap (P90–P50) narrowed markedly, whereas the lower-tail gap (P50–P10) widened modestly, reflecting stronger wage growth among median earners. Kernel density estimates further reveal a structural reallocation of employment from both tails of the wage distribution toward the upper-middle range—particularly within large firms, where the share of top earners contracted sharply, reinforcing the observed pattern of middle-wage expansion. Collectively, the findings indicate a structural equalization of Türkiye’s wage distribution with recent years showing tentative signs of divergence. Future research should disentangle the roles of productivity, wage-setting, and worker–firm sorting in shaping these evolving patterns.

Nous étudions les méthodes à effets mixtes pour l’estimation d’équations contenant des effets individuels et d’entreprise. En économie, ces modèles sont généralement estimés à l’aide de méthodes à effets fixes. Les améliorations récentes de ces méthodes à effets fixes incluent des corrections du biais dans l’estimation de la matrice de covariance des effets individuels et d’entreprise, que nous considérons également.

We find that women sorting into lower wage firms explains nearly half of the gender wage gap in South Africa, using matched employer-employee panel data covering the universe of formal sector workers. Sorting varies considerably over the life cycle: the firm-wage gender gap is negligible for the youngest workers, grows steeply for 25–35-year-olds (i.e. typical child-rearing years), and narrows for older workers. The increase is driven by those continuously employed—while women are almost as likely as men to switch firms, men are more likely to switch to better-paying firms, consistent with discrimination or non-wage amenities. Churn also contributes to the gap (though is relatively constant), since women enter formal employment at worse-paying firms than men. The importance of these two groups, the continuously employed versus entrants, depends on the size of the formal sector, thus linking the life cycle patterns underlying gender gaps with economic development.

ABSTRACT Studies of individual earnings dynamics typically overlook firm heterogeneity, while worker and firm decompositions of earnings inequality often neglect the life cycle. We study firm effects in individual earnings dynamics for the Italian private sector population, using the covariance structure of co‐worker earnings for identification. We allow for dynamics of both worker and firm effects, as well as worker‐firm sorting and worker segregation. When workers are young, firm and worker heterogeneity explain similar shares of earnings inequality; however, over the life cycle, workers account for most of the inequality. Sorting is substantial, especially among younger workers. Segregation accounts for most of the earnings inequality between firms.

Abstract This paper studies the decline in wage inequality in Taiwan from 2004 to 2019 using administrative employer‐employee matched data and the Abowd–Kramarz–Margolis (AKM) framework. Unlike the U.S. and Europe, Taiwan experienced an 8.4% drop in wage inequality, driven largely by reductions in within‐firm disparities. Minimum wage hikes likely contributed to this compression, as lower‐tail inequality declined due to faster earnings growth among low‐wage workers, while upper‐tail inequality remained relatively stable. AKM estimates, robust to bias correction, indicate that firm‐specific wage premiums account for a small share of inequality, while worker‐firm sorting has become increasingly important in explaining wage dispersion.

Nous étudions les méthodes à effets mixtes pour l’estimation d’équations contenant des effets individuels et d’entreprise. En économie, ces modèles sont généralement estimés à l’aide de méthodes à effets fixes. Les améliorations récentes de ces méthodes à effets fixes incluent des corrections du biais dans l’estimation de la matrice de covariance des effets individuels et d’entreprise, que nous considérons également.

We study the extent to which firm financial performance is passed on to workers in the form of higher wages and the degree to which this pass-through has changed over the period 2002-2018. We use both value added per worker and a measure of quasi-rents as measures of financial performance. Value added per worker is the standard measure used interna(cid:415)onally. Quasi-rents be(cid:425)er approximate the resources available to be shared between workers and firms as it takes into account the rental cost of capital as well as the reserva(cid:415)on wages of workers. We es(cid:415)mate the reserva(cid:415)on wage bill for each firm using es(cid:415)mates from a two-way fixed-effect model. We es(cid:415)mate models similar to those typically used in the interna(cid:415)onal literature and further decompose the es(cid:415)mated pass-through into the contribu(cid:415)on from worker sor(cid:415)ng and the contribu(cid:415)on from rent-sharing. Our instrumental variables es(cid:415)mates of pass-through are in the range of 0.12 and 0.19 for value added and 0.11 and 0.07 for quasi-rents. Worker sor(cid:415)ng explains between 35% and 50% of pass-through. While the extent of overall pass-through is rela(cid:415)vely stable over (cid:415)me, the contribu(cid:415)on of worker sor(cid:415)ng declines drama(cid:415)cally to explain almost none of the es(cid:415)mated pass-through. We contribute to the literature by demonstra(cid:415)ng a method to calculate quasi-rents, by tes(cid:415)ng for changes over (cid:415)me in pass-through, and examining the rela(cid:415)ve importance of worker sor(cid:415)ng over (cid:415)me. 5 presents our results, and sec(cid:415)on 6 concludes. across labour reflec(cid:415)ng ins(cid:415)tu(cid:415)onal and changes, varia(cid:415)on, cyclical features recent an overall summary of in and discuss some small FTE counts in these firms, we suggest the the most likely explana(cid:415)on nega(cid:415)ve ma(cid:425)er for wages, to a limited extent. Much of the rela(cid:415)onship is cross sec(cid:415)onal - be(cid:425)er performing firms pay higher wages. We also show that improvements in performance are related to increases in wages, albeit to a lesser extent. This could be due to the temporary nature of changes in firm performance, which firms may insulate their workers from. Where you work ma(cid:425)ers, but the general economic condi(cid:415)ons prevailing at the (cid:415)me are also crucial in explaining wage growth.

Abstract We present causal evidence on the rent-sharing elasticity of German manufacturing firms. We develop a new firm-level Bartik instrument for firm rents that combines the firms’ predetermined energy input mix with national energy carrier price changes. Instrumental variable estimation yields a rent-sharing elasticity of approximately 0.20, implying that a 10% change in rents leads to a 2% change in wages. Rent-sharing induced by energy price variation is asymmetric and driven by energy price increases, such that, on average, workers do not benefit from energy price reductions but are harmed by price increases. Reduced-form evidence shows that a 10% increase in firm-level energy prices depresses firm-level wage growth by 0.34%.

We present a model with search frictions and heterogeneous agents that allows us to decompose the overall increase in US wage inequality in the last 30 years into its within- and between-firm and skill components. We calibrate the model to evaluate how much of the overall rise in wage inequality and its components is explained by different channels. Output distribution per firm-skill pair more than accounts for the observed increase over this period. Parametric identification implies that the worker-specific component is responsible for 85 percent of this, compared to 15 percent that is attributable to firm-level productivity shifts.

Over the last half century, earnings and income inequality have increased within many countries, although the timing and extent of the increase have been variable. This development has engendered a large stream of social science research that has successfully identified some of the main culprits behind the takeoff in inequality. Given that this topic has been worked for so long and with such success, it might be thought that the chances of uncovering an unusually important fact about trends in inequality are rather low. Although that may well be the case, the PNAS paper “Rising between-workplace inequalities in high-income countries” by Tomaskovic-Devey et al. (1) has evidently beaten the odds, breaking ground by showing that the between-workplace share of earnings inequality is rapidly growing in most well-off countries. The inequality regime of contemporary well-off countries melds together 1) superstar workplaces that are chock full of relatively high-earnings workers and 2) low-end workplaces that are chock full of relatively low-earnings workers. This result may be understood as the analog to the well-known finding that residential segregation by income is increasing in the United States. As Reardon et al. (2) show, the United States is increasingly segregated into separate residential neighborhoods, some for high earners and others for low earners. It seems that economic segregation of all types is the new normal: We sleep by night in segregated neighborhoods and then work by day in segregated workplaces. This latest finding on rising earnings inequality builds upon a preexisting country-specific literature showing that between-workplace or between-firm inequality accounts for a rising share of inequality in the United States (3), West Germany (4), and Sweden (5). The key contribution of Tomaskovic-Devey et al. (1) is to show that this result is a very common one that holds in 12 of 14 well-off countries. Moreover, … [↵][1]1Email: grusky{at}stanford.edu. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

There is a large literature documenting that workers in exporting firms receive higher wages on average than workers in non-exporting firms. This is also the case for Denmark, where the unconditional exporter wage gap is 3 percent. However, little is known about the sources behind the gap: Is it because more productive (and/or higher paying) firms export, because more productive workers select into the export sector, or is it because matches in the export sector are more productive? In this paper we decompose the gap in wages into these different sources and assess their relative importance. We are the first to show that the presence of exporter-specific worker traits, that are unobservable to the econometrician, is the primary driver of the gap. To reach this finding, we employ a novel econometric strategy and exploit two state-of-art estimators. We start out with an AKM-style wage equation with worker, firm, and match fixed effects. We then use the model in a series of classical decompositions of the exporter wage gap. We show that allowing workers to have time-invariant traits specific to the exporting sector is very important for correctly assessing which factors drive the exporter wage gap. Our results suggest that workers in exporting firms have e.g. skills that are particularly valuable in the exporting sector, therefore generating higher wages in that sector. We also show that workers make job transitions based on these differential returns and thereby the exporter wage gap becomes a result of workers selecting into the export or non-export sector based on their comparative advantage. Finally, we show that our findings are not changed substantially if we instead perform the analysis in a non-linear framework instead of the linear AKM-style framework.

This paper uses U.S. Census Bureau panel data that link firm software investment to worker earnings. We regress the log of earnings of workers by age group on the software investment by their employing firm. To unpack the potential causal factors for differential software effects by age group we extend the AKM framework by including job-spell fixed effects that allow for a correlation between the worker-firm match and age and by including time-varying firm effects that allow for a correlation between wage-enhancing productivity shocks and software investments. Within job-spell, software capital raises earnings at a rate that declines post age 50 to about zero after age 65. By contrast, the effects of non-IT equipment investment on earnings increase for workers post age 50. The difference between the software and non-IT equipment effects suggests that our results are attributable to the technology rather than to age-related bargaining power. Our data further show that software capital increases the earnings of high-wage workers relative to low-wage workers and the earnings in high-wage firms relative to low-wage firms, and may thus widen earnings inequality within and across firms.

Previous work that seeks to decompose wage variance into worker and firm components often ends in a puzzle: sorting between firms and workers explains a large fraction of the log wage variance but firm differences are only a small component. In models where sorting is driven by complementarities in production (Becker [1973]) the lack of associated strong complementarities in wages is puzzling. In this paper, we suggest a solution to the puzzle by noting that workers match to jobs and not firms, and by decomposing wages into worker and job effects. Our approach nests the more common AKM specification and allows firm fixed effects to vary across occupations. We find that 38% of the observed UK wage variance between 2002 and 2019 can be attributed to job heterogeneity, 29% to matching between workers and jobs, and 18% to worker variation. This novel decomposition reconciles theory and empirics and allows us to look at UK wage inequality from 2002 to 2019 through a new lens. We document novel stylised facts: (i) differences between occupations explain two-thirds of the contribution of job heterogeneity to overall wage inequality; (ii) higher wage occupations also have larger wage variance and increasingly the variation in wages is due to sorting; (iii) higher-paying jobs and higher-wage workers increasingly co-locate in larger labour markets; (iv) variation in wages is increasing in labour market size, and sorting, especially within occupation, explains an increasingly large proportion of this variation.

We study a ridge estimator for the high-dimensional two-way fixed effect regression model with a sparse bipartite network. We develop concentration inequalities showing that when the ridge parameters increase as the log of the network size, the bias, and the variance-covariance matrix of the vector of estimated fixed effects converge to deterministic equivalents that depend only on the expected network. We provide simulations and an application using administrative data on wages for worker-firm matches.

We study many-to-one matching with transfers and peer effects, such as matching workers to firms, students to schools, residents to neighborhoods, or consumers to status goods. With flexible prices (as in the labor market), competitive equilibrium exists and is efficient under general conditions. We characterize when workforces are segregated by skill and matched to firms in a positively assortative manner. In general, equilibrium features alternating intervals of workforce segregation and compression (mixing). Comparative statics characterize when workforces are more segregated or more compressed, and when profits and wages are more or less unequal. With uniform prices (as in school or neighborhood choice), the value generated by peer effects accrues to schools rather than students, and equilibrium can be excessively segregated. Our model generalizes both assignment models (optimal transport) and Bayesian persuasion.

We examine the empirical content of a large class of dynamic matching models of the labor market with ex-ante heterogeneous firms and workers, symmetric uncertainty and learning about workers’ productivity, and firms’ monopsony power. We allow workers’ human capital, acquired before and after entry into the labor market, to be general across firms to varying degrees. Such a framework nests and extends known models of worker turnover across firms, occupational choice, wage growth, wage differentials across occupations, firms, and industries, and wage dispersion across workers and over the life cycle. We establish intuitive conditions under which the model primitives are semiparametrically identified solely from data on workers’ wages and jobs, despite the dynamics of these models giving rise to complex patterns of selection based on endogenously time-varying observable and unobservable characteristics of workers and firms. By relying on this identification argument, we develop a constructive estimator of the model primitives, which builds on common methods for mixture and extremal quantile regression models and displays standard properties. Through the lens of this framework, we investigate how well typical empirical wage measures of matching assortativeness and firms’ wage-setting power detect the degrees of sorting and monopsony power in the labor market, respectively. We show that usual measures of sorting severely understate its importance because they ignore the option value of worker human capital and the information about worker productivity acquired through employment, in terms of higher future wages and improved future sorting, which is priced into current wages thus depressing them. We also demonstrate how the markdown of wages relative to output largely overstates firms’ labor market power by ignoring that this option value, which captures future returns from acquired human capital and information, generally lowers wages. We find evidence of both of these features in U.S. data by documenting a strong degree of labor market sorting once appropriately measured and, correspondingly, a lower degree of firm monopsony power than typically documented.Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

If markets allocate CEOs efficiently across firms, better managers should sort into better firms. The correlation between firm and manager quality is therefore central to understanding misallocation and aggregate productivity. Because manager quality is unobserved, the standard empirical strategy from matched worker-firm data is to estimate latent firm and worker effects and ask whether higher-quality workers sort to higher-quality firms. In CEO labor markets, however, careers are short and mobility is sparse, so fixed-effects estimates of latent quality are noisy and their implied correlation is badly biased. We instead model firm and manager effects as a Gaussian Markov random field on the bipartite CEO--firm network. Estimating four distributional parameters---rather than hundreds of thousands of individual effects---avoids limited mobility bias, while the sparsity of the precision matrix makes likelihood-based estimation feasible on the full network. Applied to Hungarian administrative data from 1990 to 2018, the model yields strong positive assortative matching (rho = 0.7). By contrast, two-way fixed effects on the same data imply rho = -0.6, and leave-one-out bias correction reduces the magnitude but does not resolve the discrepancy. In a model-based counterfactual, perfect sorting (rho = 1) would raise aggregate output by about 6%.

This paper analyzes the allocation of workers to jobs and the wage distribution in Germany. Our main contribution is to reconcile prominent empirical models of wage dispersion (Abowd et al., 1999; Card et al., 2013) with theoretical sorting models (Shimer and Smith, 2000; Eeckhout and Kircher, 2011; Hagedorn et al., 2016). We find that empirical fixed effect models provide a valid approximation of observed wages and matching patterns for a large part of the data. For low-type workers, however, wages are decreasing in the type of the firm a worker is matched with. This prediction of theoretical sorting models is at odds with the monotonicity assumption of fixed effect models. After ranking both workers and firms, we show that low-type workers have become increasingly sorted into low-type firms over time, especially out of unemployment. This increase is driven by selection into wage-maximizing matches at the bottom of the firm type distribution. It can be linked to increased domestic outsourcing of low-type workers to business service firms.

We develop a large-firm sorting model to study the way knowledge diffuses within and across firms. We build on \citet{shimer2000assortative} and allow for workers within a firm to influence each other's knowledge. In particular, we extend the framework to allow for a given worker's human capital to influence the future path of their coworker's human capital, and vice versa. In contrast to standard sorting models, a firm's type is no longer exogenous; it is given by the distribution of human capital of its workers. Firms are created by workers spinning off and recruiting their own employees which is an important driver of knowledge diffusion. We then use micro wage data and job mobility patterns from the LEHD (the LEHD covers all private sector jobs in the US), as well as startup patterns from the Integrated LBD, to separately estimate the knowledge diffusion process and the degree of worker complementarities in production. The data yield 5 new facts: (1) the number of coworkers has an [X] effect on an individual's wage, (2) the lowest wage coworker has an [X] effect on an individual's wage, (3) the highest wage coworker (superstar) has an [X] effect on an individual's wage, (4) workers with [X] individual wages and [X] coworker wages are more likely to start their own business (explicitly controlling for access to credit), and (5) there are [X] sorting patterns, i.e. workers with higher wages are more likely to move to firms that pay [X] average wages. We use fact (5) to estimate worker complementarities in production and we use facts (1) through (4) to discipline the knowledge diffusion process. We then use the estimated model to study various counterfactuals, including the way labor market distortions, such as firing taxes, impede mobility and affect the diffusion of knowledge.

We review the literature on firm-level drivers of labor market inequality. There is strong evidence from a variety of fields that standard measures of productivity - like output per worker or total factor productivity - vary substantially across firms, even within narrowly-defined industries. Several recent studies note that rising trends in the dispersion of productivity across firms mirror the trends in the wage inequality across workers. Two distinct literatures have searched for a more direct link between these two phenomena. The first examines how wages are affected by differences in employer productivity. Studies that focus on firm-specific productivity shocks and control for the non-random sorting of workers to more and less productive firms typically find that a 10% increase in value-added per worker leads to somewhere between a 0.5% and 1.5% increase in wages. A second literature focuses on firm-specific wage premiums, using the wage outcomes of job changers. This literature also concludes that firm pay setting is important for wage inequality, with many studies finding that firm wage effects contribute approximately 20% of the overall variance of wages. To interpret these findings, we develop a model where workplace environments are viewed as imperfect substitutes by workers, and firms set wages with some degree of market power. We show that simple versions of this model can readily match the stylized empirical findings in the literature regarding rent-sharing elasticities and the structure of firm-specific pay premiums.

Recent theories of firm heterogeneity emphasize between-firm wage differences as a new mechanism through which trade can affect wage inequality. Using linked employer-employee data for Sweden, we show that many of the stylized facts about wage inequality found in Helpman et al. (2012) for Brazil also hold for Sweden. Much of overall wage inequality arises within sector-occupations and for workers with similar observable characteristics. One notable difference is a smaller contribution from between-firm differences in wages in Sweden, which could reflect the influence of Swedish labor market institutions in dampening the scope for variation in wages between firms through collective wage agreements.

Studies of individual wage dynamics typically ignore firm heterogeneity, whereas decompositions of earnings into worker and firm effects abstract from life-cycle considerations. We study firm effects in individual wage dynamics using administrative data on the population of Italian employers and employees. We propose a novel identification strategy for firm-related wage components exploiting the informative content of the wage covariance structure of coworkers. Wage inequality increases three-fold over the working life; firm effects are predominant while young, but sorting of workers into firms becomes increasingly important, explaining the largest share of lifetime inequality. Static models that do not allow for life-cycle dynamics underestimate the importance of sorting and overstate match and firm effects.

Using linked employer-employee data for Germany, I study the relationship between two major developments of the 1990s and 2000s: a stagnation of the wage gap between genders, and a pronounced rise of establishment-specific wage premiums in shaping the trends in inequality. I find that establishment premiums contribute to the wage gap between genders, and that their role has grown considerably over time: in the absence of rising workplace heterogeneity, the gender gap would have declined by around 0.6-3.6 log points, or 2.5-14.3%. An overrepresentation of women at low wage establishments is the main source of the workplace contribution in each period, whereas within-establishment wage gaps tend to reduce the role of workplaces, but decreasingly so. The trend increase of the role of workplaces is equally attributable to changes in employment and a widening of gender-specific premiums at each establishment. I document that these patterns are consistent with collective bargaining institutions compressing the wage gap within firms, and that the growing decentralisation of wage determination acts as a catalyst for the rising importance of workplaces in determining the gender wage gap.

Empirical labor economists have resorted to estimating the responsiveness of workers' wages on firms' ability to pay to assess the extent to which employers share rents with their employees. This paper compares this labor economics approach with two other approaches that rely on standard micro production data only: the productivity approach for which estimates of the output elasticities of labor and materials and data on the respective revenue shares are needed and the accounting approach which boils down to directly computing the extent of rent sharing from firm accounting information. Using matched employer-employee data on 60,294 employees working in 9,849 firms over the period 1984-2001 in France, we quantify industry differences in rent-sharing parameters derived from the three approaches. We find a median absolute extent of rent sharing of about 0.30 using either the productivity or the accounting approach. Only exploiting firm-level information brings this median rent-sharing parameter down to 0.16 using the labor economics approach. Controlling for unobserved worker ability further reduces the median absolute extent of rent sharing to 0.08. Our analysis makes clear that the three different approaches face important trade-offs. Hence, empirical economists interested in establishing that profits are shared should select the appropriate approach based on the particular research question and on the data at hand.

Postel-Vinay, F., Sepahsalari, A., 2023. Labour Mobility and Earnings in the UK, 1992-2016. The Economic Journal, forthcoming.

This paper develops the nonparametric identification of models with production complementarities, worker-firm specific disutility of labour and search frictions. Mobility in the model is subject to preference shocks, and we assume that firms can write wage contracts. We develop a constructive proof for the nonparametric identification of the model primitives from matched employer-employee data. We use the estimated model to decompose the sources of wage dispersion into worker heterogeneity, compensating differentials, and search frictions that generate between-firm and within-firm dispersion. We find that compensating differentials are substantial on average, but the contribution differs greatly between the lowest and highest types of workers. Finally, we use the model to provide an economic interpretation of several empirical regularities.

This paper develops the nonparametric identification of models with production complementarities, worker-firm specific disutility of labor and search frictions.Mobility in the model is subject to preference shocks, and we assume that firms can write wage contracts.We develop a constructive proof for the nonparametric identification of the model primitives from matched employer-employee data.We use the estimated model to decompose the sources of wage dispersion into worker heterogeneity, compensating differentials, and search frictions that generate between-firm and within-firm dispersion.We find that compensating differentials are substantial on average, but the contribution differs greatly between the lowest and highest types of workers.Finally, we use the model to provide an economic interpretation of several empirical regularities.

This paper develops the nonparametric identification of models with production complementarities, worker-firm specific disutility of labor and search frictions. Mobility in the model is subject to preference shocks

We study mixed-effects methods for estimating equations containing person and firm effects. In economics such models are usually estimated using fixed-effects methods. Recent enhancements to those fixed-effects methods include corrections to the bias in estimating the covariance matrix of the person and firm effects, which we also consider.

Economic interactions often occur in networks where heterogeneous agents (such as workers or firms) sort and produce. However, most existing estimation approaches either require the network to be dense, which is at odds with many empirical networks, or they require restricting the form of heterogeneity and the network formation process. We show how the functional differencing approach introduced by Bonhomme (2012) in the context of panel data, can be applied in network settings to derive moment restrictions on model parameters and average effects. Those restrictions are valid irrespective of the form of heterogeneity, and they hold in both dense and sparse networks. We illustrate the analysis with linear and nonlinear models of matched employer-employee data, in the spirit of the model introduced by Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999).

While neoclassical theory emphasizes the impact of trade on wage inequality between occupations and sectors, more recent theories of firm heterogeneity point to the impact of trade on wage dispersion within occupations and sectors. Using linked employer–employee data for Brazil, we show that much of overall wage inequality arises within sector–occupations and for workers with similar observable characteristics; this within component is driven by wage dispersion between firms; and wage dispersion between firms is related to firm employment size and trade participation. We then extend the heterogenous-firm model of trade and inequality from Helpman et al. (2010) and estimate it with Brazilian data. We show that the estimated model provides a close approximation to the observed distribution of wages and employment. We use the estimated model to undertake counterfactuals, in which we find sizable effects of trade on wage inequality.

This paper uses administrative data to analyze a large employer-borne payroll tax rate cut for young workers in Sweden. We find no effect on net-of-tax wages of young treated workers relative to slightly older untreated workers, and a 2–3 percentage point increase in youth employment. Firms employing many young workers receive a larger tax windfall and expand right after the reform: employment, capital, sales, and profits increase. These effects appear stronger in credit-constrained firms. Youth-intensive firms also increase the wages of all their workers collectively, young as well as old, consistent with rent sharing of the tax windfall. (JEL H25, H32, J13, J23, J31, M51)

China's emergence as a great economic power has induced an epochal shift in patterns of world trade. Simultaneously, it has challenged much of the received empirical wisdom about how labor markets adjust to trade shocks. Alongside the heralded consumer benefits of expanded trade are substantial adjustment costs and distributional consequences. These impacts are most visible in the local labor markets in which the industries exposed to foreign competition are concentrated. Adjustment in local labor markets is remarkably slow, with wages and labor-force participation rates remaining depressed and unemployment rates remaining elevated for at least a full decade after the China trade shock commences. Exposed workers experience greater job churning and reduced lifetime income. At the national level, employment has fallen in U.S. industries more exposed to import competition, as expected, but offsetting employment gains in other industries have yet to materialize. Better understanding when and where trade is costly, and how and why it may be beneficial, are key items on the research agenda for trade and labor economists.

This paper quantifies employer market power in US manufacturing and how it has changed over time. Using administrative data, we estimate plant-level markdowns—the ratio between a plant’s marginal revenue product of labor and its wage. We find most manufacturing plants operate in a monopsonistic environment, with an average markdown of 1.53, implying a worker earning only 65 cents on the marginal dollar generated. To investigate long-term trends for the entire sector, we propose a novel, theoretically grounded measure for the aggregate markdown. We find that it decreased between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, but has been sharply increasing since. (JEL J24, J31, J38, J42, L13, L60)

Abstract In this paper we make use of a matched employer‐employee database for Italy to look at the spatial distribution of wages. Using this rich database we aim to open up the black box of agglomeration economies exploiting the micro dimension of interaction among economic agents, both individuals and firms. We provide evidence that firm size and, especially, skills are sorted across space and account for a large portion of the spatial wage variation. Our data also support the assortative matching hypothesis, which we show not to be driven by co‐location of good workers and firms. Finally, we point out that assortative matching is negatively related to local market size.

We estimate interindustry wage differentials using new French longitudinal data that allow a tracking of workers and their firms over time. We find that, when measured on a cross‐sectional basis, they primarily reflect the interindustry variations in unmeasured labor quality. However, interindustry wage differentials are only a minor component of interfirm wage differentials. The average differential in wages paid to the same workers by different firms is about 20%–30%. In a given industry, wage policies are more favorable to workers in large, capital‐intensive firms.

In a model with search generated unemployment and heterogeneity on both sides of the labor market, exporting firms are bigger and pay higher wages than other firms. Moreover, there is imperfect persistence in the decision to export and liberalization increases the wage gap between high- and low-skill workers. Openness can increase aggregate productivity in export-oriented markets while generating within-firm productivity losses for the weakest firms. In contrast, openness can lead to within-firm productivity gains for the weakest firms in import-competing industries. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

I construct a theoretical framework in which firms offer wage–tenure contracts to direct the search by risk-averse workers. All workers can search, on or off the job. I characterize an equilibrium and prove its existence. The equilibrium generates a nondegenerate, continuous distribution of employed workers over the values of contracts, despite that all matches are identical and workers observe all offers. A striking property is that the equilibrium is block recursive; that is, individuals' optimal decisions and optimal contracts are independent of the distribution of workers. This property makes the equilibrium analysis tractable. Consistent with stylized facts, the equilibrium predicts that (i) wages increase with tenure, (ii) job-to-job transitions decrease with tenure and wages, and (iii) wage mobility is limited in the sense that the lower the worker's wage, the lower the future wage a worker will move to in the next job transition. Moreover, block recursivity implies that changes in the unemployment benefit and the minimum wage have no effect on an employed worker's job-to-job transitions and contracts.

This paper presents a discrete-time version of Jovanovic's model of worker-firm matching. Descriptive evidence is presented that supports the notion that unobserved worker-firm heterogeneity is an important component in the intertemporal structure of wages for young workers. A structural econometric model of wage dynamics under worker-firm sorting is developed and estimated. Finally, a formal test of the matching model is carried out, and the matching structure on intertemporal covariances of wages is not rejected. My results indicate the necessity of jointly considering processes of turnover and wage growth when analyzing the labor market experiences of young workers.

We develop an empirical search-matching model which is suitable for analyzing the wage, employment and welfare impact of regulation in a labor market with heterogeneous workers and jobs. To achieve this we develop an equilibrium model of wage determination and employment which extends the current literature on equilibrium wage determination with matching and provides a bridge between some of the most prominent macro models and microeconometric research. The model incorporates productivity shocks, long-term contracts, on-the-job search and counter-offers. Importantly, the model allows for the possibility of assortative matching between workers and jobs due to complementarities between worker and job characteristics. We use the model to estimate the potential gain from optimal regulation and we consider the potential gains and redistributive impacts from optimal unemployment benefit policy. Here optimal policy is defined as that which maximizes total output and home production, accounting for the various constraints that arise from search frictions. The model is estimated on the NLSY using the method of moments.

We develop a unique survey that focuses on the job search behavior of individuals regardless of their labor force status and field it annually starting in 2013. We use our survey to study the relationship between search effort and outcomes for the employed and non-employed. Three important facts stand out: (1) on-the-job search is pervasive, and is more intense at the lower rungs of the job ladder; (2) the employed are about four times more efficient than the unemployed in job search; and (3) the employed receive better job offers than the unemployed. We set up an on-the-job search model with endogenous search effort, calibrate it to fit our new facts, and find that the search effort of the employed is highly elastic. We show that search effort substantially amplifies labor market responses to job separation and matching efficiency shocks over the business cycle.

It is well documented that earnings inequalities have risen in many high-income countries. Less clear are the linkages between rising income inequality and workplace dynamics, how within- and between-workplace inequality varies across countries, and to what extent these inequalities are moderated by national labor market institutions. In order to describe changes in the initial between- and within-firm market income distribution we analyze administrative records for 2,000,000,000+ job years nested within 50,000,000+ workplace years for 14 high-income countries in North America, Scandinavia, Continental and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. We find that countries vary a great deal in their levels and trends in earnings inequality but that the between-workplace share of wage inequality is growing in almost all countries examined and is in no country declining. We also find that earnings inequalities and the share of between-workplace inequalities are lower and grew less strongly in countries with stronger institutional employment protections and rose faster when these labor market protections weakened. Our findings suggest that firm-level restructuring and increasing wage inequalities between workplaces are more central contributors to rising income inequality than previously recognized.

Individual labor earnings observed in worker panel data have complex, highly persistent dynamics. We investigate the capacity of a structural job search model with on‐the‐job search, wage renegotiation by mutual consent, and i.i.d. productivity shocks to replicate salient properties of these dynamics, such as the covariance structure of earnings, the evolution of individual earnings mean, and variance with the duration of uninterrupted employment, or the distribution of year‐to‐year earnings changes. Structural estimation of our model on a 12‐year panel of highly educated British workers shows that our simple framework produces a dynamic earnings structure that is remarkably consistent with the data.

Abstract Governments go to great lengths to attract foreign multinationals because they are thought to raise the wages paid to their employees (direct effects) and to improve outcomes at local domestic firms (indirect effects). We construct the first U.S. employer-employee data set with foreign ownership information from tax records to measure these direct and indirect effects. We find the average direct effect of a foreign multinational firm on its U.S. workers is a 7% increase in wages. This premium is larger for higher-skilled workers and for the employees of firms from high GDP per capita countries. We find evidence that it is membership in a multinational production network—instead of foreignness—that generates the foreign-firm premium. We leverage the past spatial clustering of foreign-owned firms by country of ownership to identify the indirect effects. An expansion in the foreign-multinational share of commuting-zone employment substantially increases the employment, value added, and—for higher-earning workers—wages at local domestic-owned firms. Per job created by a foreign multinational, our estimates suggest annual gains of US$13,400 to the aggregate wages of local incumbents, two-thirds of which are from indirect effects. Our estimates suggest that—via mega-deals for subsidies from local governments—foreign multinationals are able to extract a sizable fraction of the local surplus they generate.

We link industry-level data on trade and offshoring with individual-level worker data from the Current Population Surveys from 1984 to 2002. We find that occupational exposure to globalization is associated with significant wage effects, while industry exposure has no significant impact. We present evidence that globalization has put downward pressure on worker wages through the reallocation of workers away from higher wage manufacturing jobs into other sectors and other occupations. Using a panel of workers, we find that occupation switching due to trade led to real wage losses of 12 to 17 percentage points.

Limited Mobility Bias explains why positive assortative matching is not observed in the empirical literature. Using German social security records, we estimate the correlation between worker and firm contributions to wage equations and find that it is unambiguously positive.

We use linked employer-employee data from Italy to explore the relationship between exports and wages. Exploiting the 1992 devaluation of the lira, we show that exporting firms both pay a wage premium above what their workers would earn in the outside labor market (the “rent-sharing” effect) and employ workers whose skills command a higher price after the devaluation (the “skill composition” effect). The latter only emerges once we allow for the value of workers’ skills to differ in the pre- and post-devaluation periods. We also document that the export wage premium is larger for workers with more export-related experience.

We document a large decrease in earnings inequality in Brazil between 1996 and 2012. Using administrative linked employer-employee data, we fit high-dimensional worker and firm fixed-effects models to understand the sources of this decrease. Firm effects account for 40 percent of the total decrease and worker effects for 29 percent. Changes in observable worker and firm characteristics contributed little to these trends. Instead, the decrease is primarily due to a compression of returns to these characteristics, particularly a declining firm productivity-pay premium. Our results shed light on potential drivers of earnings inequality dynamics. (JEL D22, D63, J24, J31, L25, M52, O15)

We assemble a new matched employer-employee data set covering essentially all industries and occupations across all regions of the U.S. We use this data set to re-examine the question of the relative contributions to the overall sex gap in wages of sex segregation vs. wage differences by sex within occupation, industry, establishment, and occupation-establishment cells. This new data set is especially useful because earlier research on this topic relied on data sets that covered only a narrow range of industries, occupations, or regions. Our results indicate that a sizable fraction of the sex gap in wages is accounted for by the segregation of women into lower-paying occupations, industries, establishments, and occupations within establishments. Nonetheless, a substantial part of the sex gap in wages remains attributable to the individual's sex. This latter finding contrasts sharply with the conclusions of previous research (especially Further research into the sources of withinestablishment within-occupation sex wage differences is therefore much more important than previously thought.

This paper investigates the impact of investment in automation- and AI-related goods on within-firm wage inequality in the French economy during the 2002–2017 period. We document that most wage inequality in France is accounted for by differences among workers belonging to the same firm rather than by differences between sectors, firms, and occupations. Using an event-study approach on a sample of firms importing automation- and AI-related goods, we find that spike events related to the adoption of automation- and AI-related capital goods are not followed by an increase in within-firm wage inequality or in gender wage inequality. Instead, wages increase by 1% three years after the events at different percentiles of the distribution. Our findings are not linked to the rent-sharing behavior of firms obtaining productivity gains from automation and AI adoption. Instead, if wage gains do not differ across workers along the wage distribution, worker heterogeneity will still be present. Indeed, in agreement with the framework in Abowd et al. (1999b), most of the overall wage increase is due to the hiring of new employees. This adds to previous findings presenting a picture of a ‘labor friendly’ effect of the latest wave of new technologies within adopting firms.

We estimate the impact of the firm component of hourly wage variation on separations from matched Oregon employer-employee data. We use both firm fixed effects estimated from a wage equation as well as a matched IV event study around employment transitions between firms. Separations decline with firm wage policies: the implied firm-level labor supply elasticities are around 4, consistent with recent quasiexperimental evidence, but 3 to 4 times larger than existing estimates using individual wages. We find that monopsonistic competition is pervasive, even in low-wage, high turnover sectors, but with little heterogeneity by labor market concentration.

This paper characterizes the equilibrium for a large class of search models with two-sided heterogeneity and on-the-job search. Besides the well-known congestion externalities, we show that on-the-job search in combination with monopsonistic wage setting &lt;it&gt;without&lt;/it&gt; commitment creates a “business-stealing” externality. In the absence of congestion effects, this leads to excessive vacancy creation. Under wage setting &lt;it&gt;with&lt;/it&gt; commitment this externality is absent because when posting a wage, firms take into account the expected productivity of future workers in their current jobs. If firms are able to make and respond to counteroffers, then they will not have to pay no-quit premia and this also leads to excessive vacancy creation.

Using linked employer-employee data for West Germany, I investigate the role of growing wage differentials between firms in the slowdown of gender wage convergence since the 1990s. The results show that two factors are at play: first, high-wage firms experience higher wage growth and employ disproportionately more men, and second, male firm premiums grow faster than female premiums in the same firms. These developments were catalyzed by a decline of union coverage, coupled with more firm-specific wage setting in collective bargaining agreements. Taken together, these conditions prevented the gender gap from narrowing by approximately 15 percent between the 1990s and 2000s. (JEL J16, J51, J31, J71)

Abstract Italian male wage inequality has increased at a relatively fast pace from the mid‐1980s until the early 2000s, while it has been persistently flat since then. We analyse this trend, focusing on the period of most rapid growth in pay dispersion. By accounting for worker and firm fixed effects, it is shown that workers' heterogeneity has been a major determinant of increased wage inequalities, while variability in firm wage policies has declined over time. We also show that the growth in pay dispersion has entirely occurred between livelli di inquadramento , that is, job titles defined by national industry‐wide collective bargaining institutions, for which specific minimum wages apply. We conclude that the underlying market forces determining wage inequality have been largely channelled into the tight tracks set by the centralized system of industrial relations.

We study how workers’ wages respond to changes in firm‐level physical productivity using Swedish data. We find that technology shocks affect workers’ wages through both internal and external forces. Wages respond three times as much to physical productivity shocks that are shared with outside firms within the same sector as they do to firm‐level physical productivity shocks. The larger impact of sectoral physical productivity is related to the degree of within‐sector labour mobility, suggesting that the productivity evolution among firms that draw their labour from the same market segment is a crucial determinant of the wage growth of incumbent workers.

Despite dramatic workforce gains by women in recent decades, a substantial gender earnings gap persists and widens over the course of men's and women's careers. Since there are earnings differences across establishments, a key question is whether the widening of the gender pay gap arises from differences in career advances within the same establishment or from differential gains from job-to-job moves across establishments. Using a unique match between the 2000 Decennial Census of the United States and the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) data, we find that both channels are important and affect workers differently by education. For the college educated, the increasing gap is for the most part due to differential earnings growth within establishment. The establishment component explains only 27% of the widening of the total gender pay gap for this group. For workers without college degree, the establishment component is the main driver of the, relatively small, widening of the gender earnings gap. For both education groups, marriage plays a crucial role in the establishment component of the increasing earnings gap.

The two main axes of inequality in the U.S. labor market—occupation and workplace—have increasingly consolidated. In 1999, the largest share of employment at high-paying workplaces was blue-collar production workers, but by 2017 it was managers and professionals. As such, workers benefiting from a high-paying workplace are increasingly those who already benefit from membership in a high-paying occupation. Drawing on occupation-by-workplace data, we show that up to two-thirds of the rise in wage inequality since 1999 can be accounted for not by occupation or workplace inequality alone, but by this increased consolidation. Consolidation is not primarily due to outsourcing or to occupations shifting across a fixed set of workplaces. Instead, consolidation has resulted from new bases of workplace pay premiums. Workplace premiums associated with teams of professionals have increased, while premiums for previously high-paid blue-collar workers have been cut. Yet the largest source of consolidation is bifurcation in the social sector, whereby some previously low-paying but high-professional share workplaces, like hospitals and schools, have deskilled their jobs, while others have raised pay. Broadly, the results demonstrate an understudied way that organizations affect wage inequality: not by directly increasing variability in workplace or occupation premiums, but by consolidating these two sources of inequality.

Existing work on imperfect competition typically focuses on either the labor market or the product market in isolation.In contrast, we analyze imperfect competition in both markets jointly, showing theoretically and empirically that focusing on one market in isolation may result in a limited or misleading picture of the degree and impacts of market power.Our empirical setting is the US construction industry.We develop, identify and estimate a model where construction firms imperfectly compete with one another for workers in the labor market and for projects in both the private market and the government market, where government projects are procured through auctions.Our analyses combine the universe of business and worker tax records with newly collected records from government procurement auctions.We use the estimated model to quantify the markdown of wages and the markup of prices, to show that the impacts of an increase in market power in one market are attenuated by the existence of market power in the other market, and to quantify the rents, rent-sharing, and incidence of procurements in the US construction industry.

We provide new estimates of the separations elasticity, a proximate determinant of the labor supply facing a firm with respect to hourly wage, using matched Oregon employer-employee data. Existing estimates using individual wage variation may be biased by mismeasured wages and use of wage variation unrelated to firm choices. We estimate the impact of the firm component of wage variation on separations using both firm fixed effects estimated from a wage equation as well as a matched IV event study around employment transitions between firms. Separations are a declining function of firm wage policies: we find that the implied firm-level labor supply elasticities generated are around 4, consistent with recent experimental and quasiexperimental evidence, and that they are approximately 3 to 4 times larger that those using individual wages. Further, we find lower separations elasticities for low wage workers, high turnover sectors, and periods of economic downturn but with little heterogeneity by urban status or labor market concentration. We conclude that monopsonistic competition is pervasive, and largely independent of forces driving classical monopsony.

We estimate the magnitudes of reduced earnings, work hours, and wage rates of workers displaced during the Great Recession using linked employer-employee panel data from Washington State. Displaced workers' earnings losses occurred mainly because hourly wage rates dropped at the time of displacement and recovered sluggishly. Lost employer-specific premiums explain only 17 percent of these losses. Fully 70 percent of displaced workers moved to employers paying the same or higher wage premiums than the displacing employers, but these workers nevertheless suffered substantial wage rate losses. Loss of valuable specific workeremployer matches explain more than half of the wage losses.

This paper examines the role of international trade for job polarization-the decline in opportunities for mid-wage workers while those for high-and low-wage workers increase. With employer-employee matched data on virtually all workers and firms in Denmark between 1999 and 2009, we show that import competition has caused worker-level adjustments that lead to job polarization. When mid-wage workers adjust to the shock, highly educated and skilled workers end up in high-wage jobs whereas less educated workers end up in low-wage positions. We show that the specific tasks performed by a worker are central in determining trade's impact, and workers performing manual tasks are the ones most affected regardless of how routine or nonroutine these tasks are. Trade lets foreign workers compete against domestic workers, in contrast to technical progress which pits man versus machine country by country. Quantitatively, we find that job polarization through trade-induced worker adjustments is at least as strong as through technical change and offshoring.

The authors use three distinct methods to investigate the influence of industrial relations on firm wage premia in Germany. First, ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions for the firm effects from a two-way fixed-effects decomposition of workers’ wages reveal that average premia are larger in firms bound by collective agreements and in firms with a works council, holding constant firm performance. Next, recentered influence function (RIF) regressions show that premia are less dispersed among covered firms but more dispersed among firms with a works council. Finally, in an Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition, the authors find that decreasing bargaining coverage is the only factor they consider that contributes to the marked rise in premia dispersion over time.

We document a significant increase in the sorting of workers by cognitive and non-cognitive skills across Swedish firms between 1986 and 2008. The weight of the evidence suggests that the increase in sorting is due to stronger complementarities between worker skills and technology. In particular, a large fraction of the increase can be explained by the expansion of the ICT sector and a reallocation of engineers across firms. We also find evidence of increasing assortative matching, in the sense that workers who are particularly skilled in their respective educational groups are more likely to work in the same firms. Changes in sorting patterns and skill gradients can account for a about half of the increase in between-firm wage dispersion.

Abstract We devise a tractable model of firm dynamics with on-the-job search. The model admits analytical solutions for equilibrium outcomes, including quit, layoff, hiring, and vacancy-filling rates, as well as the distributions of job values, a fundamental challenge posed by the environment. Optimal labor demand takes a novel form whereby hiring firms allow their marginal product to diffuse over an interval. The evolution of the marginal product over this interval endogenously exhibits gradual mean reversion, evoking a notion of imperfect labor market competition. This in turn contributes to dispersion in marginal products, giving rise to endogenous misallocation. Quantitatively, the model provides a parsimonious reconciliation of leading estimates of rent sharing, the negative association between wages and quits, the link between job and worker flows, and the cyclicality of labor market quantities and prices.

We estimate the impact of international trade on wages using data for French manufacturing firms. We instrument firm-level trade flows with firm-specific instrumental variables based on world demand and supply shocks. Both export and offshoring shocks have a positive effect on wages. Exports increase wages for all occupational categories while offshoring has heterogeneous effects. The impact of trade on wages varies across bargaining regimes. In firms with collective bargaining, the elasticity of wages with respect to exports and offshoring is higher than in firms with no collective bargaining. Wage gains associated with collective bargaining are similar across worker categories.

In this paper, we use linked employer-employee data to study the reallocation of heterogeneous workers between heterogeneous firms. We build on recent evidence of a cyclical job ladder that reallocates workers from low-productivity to high-productivity firms through job-to-job moves. In this paper, we turn to the question of who moves up this job ladder and the implications for worker sorting across firms. Not surprisingly, we find that job-to-job moves reallocate younger workers disproportionately from less productive to more productive firms. More surprisingly, especially in the context of the recent literature on assortative matching with on-the-job search, we find that job-to-job moves disproportionately reallocate less educated workers up the job ladder. This finding holds even though we find that more educated workers are more likely to work with more productive firms. We find that while highly educated workers are less likely to match to low-productivity firms, they are also less likely to separate from them, with less educated workers more likely to separate to a better employer in expansions and to be shaken off the ladder (separate to nonemployment) in contractions. Our findings underscore the cyclical role job-to-job moves play in matching workers to better-paying employers.

Many theories of labor market turnover generate a job ladder. Due to search frictions, workers earn rents from employment. All workers agree on which jobs are, in this sense, more desirable and slowly climb the job ladder through job-to-job quits. Occasionally, negative shocks throw them off the ladder and back into unemployment. We review a recent body of theory and empirical evidence on labor market turnover through the lens of the job ladder. We focus on the critical role that the job ladder plays in transmitting aggregate shocks, through the pace and direction of employment reallocation, to economic activity and wages and in shaping business cycles more generally. The main evidence concerns worker transitions, both through nonemployment and from job to job, between firms of different sizes, ages, productivity levels, and wage premiums, as well as the resulting earnings growth. Poaching by firms up the ladder is the main engine of reallocation, which shuts down in recessions.

This paper examines the evolution of the wage structure in France after 1984. Our data come from two matched employer-employee wage surveys performed in 1986 and 1992. So, we have two cross-sections of establishments and individuals. A subsample of establishments present in both surveys allows us to analyse time-variations. We find that the wage inequality increased between 1986 and 1992, which seems to be, in large part, explained by the evolution of employer-specific compensation policies. We analyse the role of employer characteristics in this evolution. We also show that between-plant specialization dramatically increased during the period in all dimensions. Finally, we observe that the evolutions of employer-specific wage policies are correlated with changes of the workforce in terms of experience and seniority.

This study documents two empirical facts using matched employer-employee data for Denmark and Portugal. First, workers who are hired last, are the first to leave the firm. Second, workers' wages rise with seniority (= a worker's tenure relative to the tenure of her colleagues). The identification problems for the wage return to tenure are shown not to apply to the return to seniority because seniority is not a deterministic function of time. Controlling for tenure, the probability of leaving the firm decreases with seniority. The increase in expected seniority with tenure explains a large part of the negative duration dependence of the hazard. Using a variety of estimation methods, we show that a 10% increase in seniority raises your wage by 0.1-0.2%, depending on the country and the method applied. Conditional on ten years of tenure, one standard deviation of seniority raises your wage by 0.5 to 1.6 percent. Forthcoming in Econometrica.

We examine the effect of firm profits on wages for individual workers while focusing on the empirical complications associated with estimating the extent of rent-sharing. Controlling for worker and firm fixed-effects and using several instruments to deal with the endogeneity of profits, we report results indicating that Ordinary Least Square (OLS)-estimates strongly underestimate the effects of profits on wages. Moreover, the effect of profits on wages are estimated separately for firms with increasing and decreasing profits within a given time period. We find a positive and stable effect only in firms with increasing profits. This is in line with the idea that falling profits do not lead to wage cuts while increasing profits imply higher wages.

How much power do employers have to suppress wages below marginal productivity? It depends on the firm-level labor supply elasticity. Leveraging data on job applications from the large job board CareerBuilder.com, we estimate the wage impact on workers' choice among differentiated jobs in the largest occupations. We use a nested logit model of worker's utility for applying to jobs with varying wages and characteristics, including distance from the potential worker's home. We account for the endogeneity of wages by using several different instrumental variable strategies. We find that failing to instrument results in implausibly low elasticities, whereas plausible instruments result in more elastic estimates. Still, the implied market-level labor supply elasticity is about 0.6, while the firm-level labor supply elasticity is about 5.8. This implies that workers produce about 17% more than their wage level, consistent with employers having significant market power even for the largest occupational labor markets.

The 1990's dealt a blow to traditional Heckscher-Ohlin analysis of the relationship between trade and income inequality, as it became clear that rising inequality in low-income countries and other features of the data were inconsistent with that model. As a result, economists moved away from trade as a plausible explanation for rising income inequality. In recent years, however, a number of new mechanisms have been explored through which trade can affect(and usually increase) income inequality. These include within-industry effects due to heterogeneous?firms; effects of offshoring of tasks; effects on incomplete contracting; and effects of labor-market frictions. A number these mechanisms have received substantial empirical support.

I study the long-term effects of landing a first job at a large firm versus a small one using Spanish administrative data. Size could be a relevant employer attribute for inexperienced workers since large firms are associated with greater productivity, wages, and training. The key empirical challenge is selection into first jobs based on unobserved worker characteristics. I develop an instrumental variable approach that, keeping business cycle conditions fixed, leverages variation in the composition of labor demand that labor market entrants face. Initially matching with a larger firm persistently improves long-term outcomes, even through subsequent jobs. Mechanisms suggest better skill development at large firms.

We present new evidence on the extent of rent sharing based on a large panel of matched worker-firm data for Sweden. Controlling for worker and firm heterogeneity, as well as examining the problem of endogeneity of profits, we report evidence implying the existence of rent sharing. Another result is that unemployment risk, aggregated at the firm and various industry levels, has a negative effect on individual workers’ wages after controlling for individual differences in unemployment risk.

This paper considers inference on fixed effects in a linear regression model estimated from network data. An important special case of our setup is the two‐way regression model. This is a workhorse technique in the analysis of matched data sets, such as employer–employee or student–teacher panel data. We formalize how the structure of the network affects the accuracy with which the fixed effects can be estimated. This allows us to derive sufficient conditions on the network for consistent estimation and asymptotically valid inference to be possible. Estimation of moments is also considered. We allow for general networks and our setup covers both the dense and the sparse case. We provide numerical results for the estimation of teacher value‐added models and regressions with occupational dummies.

This study analyzes the relationship between discriminatory social attitudes toward gender equality and firms’ pay-setting behavior by combining information about regional votes on constitutional amendments on equal rights for women and men with a large data set of multi-establishment firms and workers. The results show a strong relationship between discriminatory social attitudes toward gender equality and gender pay gaps within firms across regions. The results remain robust, even when the authors account for detailed worker and job characteristics and for regional sorting of firms. Overall, the results suggest that gender pay gaps are larger in regions where more people oppose gender equality rights. In other words, in the same firm women earn lower wages than their male coworkers in regions where more people have discriminatory social attitudes toward gender equality.

This paper combines on-the-job search and human capital theory to study the coexistence of firm-funded general training and frequent job turnovers. Although ex ante identical, firms differ in their training decisions. The model generates correlations between various firm characteristics that are consistent with the data. Wage dispersion exists among ex ante identical workers because workers of the same productivity are paid differently across firms, and because workers differ in their productivity ex post. Endogenous training breaks the perfect correlation between work experience and human capital, which yields new insights on wage dispersion and wage dynamics. © 2010.

We develop a two‐country model with heterogeneous producers and rent‐sharing at the firm level. We identify two sources of a multinational wage premium: A composition effect because multinational firms are more productive, make higher profits, and pay higher wages, and a firm‐level wage effect, because a firm makes higher global profits and thus pays higher wages in its home market when becoming multinational. With two identical countries, the wage premium is fully explained by firm characteristics. Allowing for technology differences between countries, a residual wage premium exists in the technologically backward country but not in the advanced country.

This paper documents important shifts in the occupational composition of industries following high merger and acquisition (M&A) activity as well as accompanying increases in mean wages and wage inequality. We propose mergers and acquisitions act as a catalyst for skill-biased and routine-biased technological change. We argue that due to an increase in scale, improved efficiency or lower financial constraints, M&As facilitate technology adoption and automation, disproportionately increasing the productivity of high-skill workers and enabling the displacement of occupations involved in routine-tasks, typically mid-income occupations. An increase in M&A intensity of 10% is associated with a 24% (27%) reduction in industry (local labor market) routine share intensity and an eight (sixteen) percentage point increase in the share of high skill workers. These results have important implications on wage inequality: An increase in M&A activity by 10% is associated with a 24% (43%) increase in the mean industry (local labor market) hourly wage and an 20% (48%) increase in industry (local labor market) wage polarization. Our results are robust to several robustness tests which further support the notion that firm reorganizations through M&As are a first-order driving force of job polarization and inequality.

Using a matched employer-employee data set, we study the effects of trade liberalization on wage dispersion in Brazil across heterogeneous worker groups, keeping in mind that the assignment of workers to firms may be non-random and determined by the time-invariant productivity of workers specific to the firms with which they are matched. We find differential effects of trade reform on residual wage inequality across worker groups. High education workers experience greater increases in wage dispersion relative to low education workers following trade liberalization. This finding is broadly consistent with the theoretical predictions that emerge from models with heterogeneous firms, heterogeneous workers, and labor market frictions.

Abstract This chapter outlines the Swedish labor market institutions, the turbulent macroeconomic events of the 1990s, and the evolution of labor mobility and fixed-term contracts as a background to the later analysis of wages and mobility. It also reports detailed descriptive evidence of wages, wage changes, and mobility at the plant level in the Swedish private corporate sector for the years 1986, 1990, 1995, and 2000. The evolution of the wage structure is then covered. The data show that although the rate of real wage changes increasingly varies between plants, the variation of wage changes has remained stable within plants. The wage dispersion has increased quite consistently for the corporate sector and for the private corporate sector, where the dispersion has been relatively stable. Wages and productivity at the plant level are strongly positively correlated, both in levels and changes.

We use administrative US matched employer-employee data merged with detailed information on individuals' academic records to assess the extent to which returns to education are mediated by the sorting of workers across firms. We present three results. First, we confirm findings in the earlier literature of large pay differences across higher education degrees. Second, we show that up to one quarter of pay premiums for higher degrees are explained by between-firm pay differences. Third, higher degrees are associated with greater representation at the best-paying firms. We conclude that employer heterogeneity is an important factor in mediating the returns to education.

Using German establishment-level data, this article analyses whether wages respond to firm-specific profitability conditions. Particular emphasis is given to the question of whether the extent of rent-sharing varies with collective bargaining coverage. In this context, two conflicting hypotheses are tested. The first one asserts that unions exploit their bargaining power at the firm level and appropriate a larger share of rents than the bargaining parties in uncovered firms. The second one states that unions favour a compressed intra-industry wage structure and suppress the responsiveness of wages to firm-specific profitability conditions. The empirical analysis provides strong support for the second hypothesis. While Pooled Ordinary Least Squares (POLS) estimates yield positive estimates of the rent-sharing coefficient in covered establishments, dynamic panel data estimates accounting for unobserved heterogeneity and the endogeneity of rents point to a rent-sharing coefficient of zero.

How do firm-level collective agreements affect firm performance in a multi-level bargaining system? Using detailed Belgian linked employer-employee panel data, our findings show that firm agreements increase both wage costs and labour productivity (with respect to sector-level agreements). Relying on a recent approach developed by Bartolucci (2014), they also indicate that firm agreements exert a stronger impact on wages than on productivity, so that on average profitability is hampered. However, this rent-sharing effect only holds in sectors where firms are more concentrated. Firm agreements are thus mainly found to raise wages beyond labour productivity when the rents to be shared between workers and firms are relatively big. Overall, this suggests that firm-level agreements benefit both employers and employees – through higher productivity and wages – without being detrimental to firms’ gross profits.

This review surveys the literature on sorting in the labor market. There are inherent differences in worker ability and across-firm productivity. Two fundamental questions are whether the exact composition of skills of workers and productivity of firms affects output and how this composition determines the equilibrium allocation of workers within a firm and between firms. There has been a surge of research investigating the causes and consequences of the process of allocation of heterogeneous workers to firms. The focus in this review is on theory that sheds light on open questions in macroeconomics, labor, and industrial organization, with a particular emphasis on the role of firm size. Those models allow us to infer from the observed sorting patterns (who matches with whom) what the underlying technological determinants are and how they have evolved in recent decades. Furthermore, they help us understand the technological origins of important labor market trends, such as the increase in wage inequality and the change in labor market and firm dynamics.

Using linked employer-employee data from Brazil, we document a significant gender pay gap, which is largely attributed to women working at lower-paying employers. To interpret this fact, we develop an equilibrium search model with endogenous firm pay, amenities, and hiring. We provide a constructive proof of identification of all model parameters. The estimated model suggests that amenities are important for both men and women, and that compensating differentials account for half of the gender pay gap. Equal treatment policies partly close gender gaps but are not output- or welfare-improving. (JEL E24, J16, J23, J31, J32, M51, O15)

This paper analyzes Chile's 2009 Equal Pay for Equal Work Law (EPL) and its effects on firm pay premiums. The law affected firms with 10 or more workers and specified penalties by firm size, including a disclosure requirement for firms with 200 or more workers. We use matched employer-employee data to estimate worker-firm fixed-effects models, decomposing the firm's contribution to the gender pay gap into bargaining power and sorting channels. The EPL reduces the firm premium gender gap by 6.1%, driven by the bargaining power channel. The effects are larger in firms exposed to higher penalties and disclosure requirements.

This paper quantifies the extent to which the U.S. manufacturing labor market is characterized by employer market power and how such market power has changed over time. We find that the vast majority of U.S. manufacturing plants operate in a monopsonistic environment and, at least since the early 2000s, the labor market in U.S. manufacturing has become more monopsonistic. To reach this conclusion, we exploit rich administrative data for U.S. manufacturers and estimate plant-level markdowns—the ratio between a plant’s marginal revenue product of labor and its wage. In a competitive labor market, markdowns would be equal to unity. Instead, we find substantial deviations from perfect competition, as markdowns average 1.53. This result implies that a worker employed at the average manufacturing plant earns 65 cents on each dollar generated on the margin. To investigate long-term trends in employer market power, we propose a novel measure for the aggregate markdown that is consistent with aggregate wedges and also incorporates the local nature of labor markets. We find that the aggregate markdown decreased between the late 1970s and the early 2000s, but has been sharply increasing since.

Many biases plague the analysis of whether employers share rents with their employees, unlike what is predicted by the competitive labour market model. Using a Portuguese matched employer-employee panel, this article is one of the first to address these biases in three complementary ways: (1) Controlling directly for the fact that firms that share more rents will, ceteris paribus, have lower net-of-wages profits. (2) Instrumenting profits via interactions between the exchange rate and the share of exports in firm's total sales. (3) Considering firm or firm/worker spell fixed effects and highlighting the role of downward wage rigidity. These approaches clarify conflicting findings in the literature and result, in our preferred specifications, in significant evidence of rent sharing (a Lester range of pay dispersion of 56%), also shown to be robust to a number of competitive interpretations.

This paper provides evidence from the US and Denmark that managers with a business degree (“business managers”) reduce their employees’ wages. Within five years of the appointment of a business manager, wages decline by 6% and the labor share by 5 percentage points in the US, and by 3% and 3 percentage points in Denmark. Firms appointing business managers are not on differential trends and do not enjoy higher output, investment, or employment growth thereafter. Using manager retirements and deaths and an IV strategy based on the diffusion of the practice of appointing business managers within industry, region and size quartile cells, we provide additional evidence that these are causal effects. We establish that the proximate cause of these (relative) wage effects are changes in rent-sharing practices following the appointment of business managers. Exploiting exogenous export demand shocks, we show that non-business managers share profits with their workers, whereas business managers do not. But consistent with our first set of results, these business managers show no greater ability to increase sales or profits in response to exporting opportunities. Finally, we use the influence of role models on college major choice to instrument for the decision to enroll in a business degree in Denmark and show that our estimates correspond to causal effects of practices and values acquired in business education—rather than the differential selection into business education of individuals unlikely to share rents with workers. This figure plots event-study estimates and 95% confidence intervals separately for workers who are union members and workers who are not union members, where events are manager transitions from a non-business manager to a business manager in Denmark. The dependent variable is log annual wage. Standard errors are clustered at the firm level. This figure plots event-study estimates and 95% confidence intervals, where events are manager transitions from a non-business manager to a business manager in Denmark. The regression controls for firm fixed effects, initial size quintile by year fixed effects, region × year fixed effects and industry × year fixed effects, and observations are weighted by firm employment. The dependent variable is the share of workers at the firm who are union members. Standard errors are clustered at the firm level. This figure plots event-study estimates and 95% confidence intervals, where events are manager transitions from a non-business manager to a business manager in Denmark. The sample includes firms that have non-business managers in all years, and firms that have one non-business to business manager transition event during the sample period. All regressions control for firm fixed effects, initial size quintile by year fixed effects, region × year fixed effects, industry × year fixed effects, firm × worker fixed effects, quadratic in experience, and union and marital status dummies. The dependent variable is the value of stock option payments. Standard errors are clustered at the firm level. This figure plots event-study estimates and 95% confidence intervals, where events are placebo manager transitions from a non-business manager to a non-business manager in Denmark. The dependent variable is the share of workers that quit the firm to join another firm or become unemployed in the following year. All regressions include firm fixed effects, industry × year fixed effects, state(region) × year fixed effects, and initial size quintile by year fixed effects, and observations are weighted by employment. Standard errors are clustered at the firm level.

This paper develops a random-matching model of a frictional labor market with firm and worker dynamics. Multi-worker firms choose whether to shrink or expand their employment in response to shocks to their decreasing returns to scale technology. Growing entails posting costly vacancies, which are filled either by the unemployed or by employees poached from other firms. Firms also choose when to enter and exit the market. Tractability is obtained by proving that, under a parsimonious set of assumptions, all workers' and firm decisions are characterized by their joint marginal surplus, which in turn only depends on the firm's productivity and size. As frictions vanish, the model converges to a standard competitive model of firm dynamics which allows a quantification of the misallocation cost of labor market frictions. An estimated version of the model yields cross-sectional patterns of net poaching by firm characteristics (e.g., age and size) that are in line with the micro data. The model also generates a drop in job-to-job transitions as firm entry declines, offering an interpretation to U.S. labor market dynamics around the Great Recession. All these outcomes are a reflection of the job ladder in marginal surplus that emerges in equilibrium.

We construct a new linked data set with over one thousand offshoring events by matching Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program petition data to U.S. Census Bureau microdata. We exploit these data to study the short- and long-term effects of offshoring on domestic firm-level employment, output, wages, and productivity in this large sample of offshoring events. As implied by heterogeneous firm models with high fixed costs of offshoring, we find that the average offshoring firm in the TAA sample is larger, more productive, older, and more likely to be an exporter, than the average non-offshorer. After initiating offshoring, TAA-certified offshorers experience large declines in employment (0.38 log points), output (0.33log points) and capital (0.25log points), and a concomitant increase in capital and skill intensity, relative to their industry peers. We find no significant change in average wages or productivity measures. Even six years after the initial offshoring event, we find no recovery in employment, output, or capital, and a higher probability of exit. We find similar results (including decline in output, and unchanged wages and productivity) for the aggregate of non-TAA certified plants of multi-plant offshoring firms. We find that the substitution of domestic activity by offshoring is stronger for relatively lower wage, lower capital intensity, lower productivity offshorers. Our results are consistent across two separate difference-in-differences (DID) approaches, and a number of robustness checks.

The analysis of the effects of firm-level international trade on wages has so far focused on the role of exports, which are also typically treated as a composite good. However, we show in this paper that firm-level imports can actually be a wage determinant as important as exports. Furthermore, we also find significant differences in the relationship between trade and wages across types of products. In particular, firms that increase their exports (imports) of high- (intermediate-) technology products tend to increase their salaries. Our analysis is based on unique data from Portugal, obtained by merging a matched firm-worker panel and a matched firm-transaction panel. Our data set follows the population of manufacturing firms and all their workers from 1995 to 2005 and allows for several control variables, including jobspell fixed effects.

This paper estimates a wage equation with three high-dimensional fixed effects, using a longitudinal matched employer-employee dataset covering virtually all Portuguese wage earners over a little more than two decades. The variation in log real hourly wages is decomposed into different components related to worker, firm, and job title characteristics (both observed and unobserved) and a residual component.It is found that worker permanent heterogeneity is the most important source of wage variation (36.0 percent) and that the unobserved component plays a more important role (21.0 percent) than the observed component (15.0 percent) in explaining wage differentials. Firm permanent effects are less important overall (28.7 percent) and are due in almost equal parts to the unobserved component and the observed component. Job title effects emerge as the least important dimension but they still explain close to 10 percent of wage variation. We found definitive evidence of positive assortative matching.

We document a significant increase in the sorting of workers by cognitive and noncognitive skills across Swedish firms during 1986-2008. During this period, worker skill differences between firms increased, while within-firm skill differences fell. A significant fraction of the increase in the between-firm differences in cognitive skill is due to high-skilled workers moving into the information and communications technology (ICT) sector. Within-firm skill differences fell in all major industries, but particularly in the manufacturing sector. Combined with steeper firm-level skill gradients, the increase in sorting can account for 45 percent of the increase in between-firm wage dispersion during our period of study.

It is widely believed that rent-sharing reduces the incentives for investment when long term contracts are infeasible because some of the returns to sunk capital are captured by workers. We propose a simple test for the degree of hold-up based on the fraction of capital costs that are deducted from the quasi-rent that determines negotiated wages. We implement the test using a data set that combines Social Security earnings records for workers in the Veneto region of Italy with detailed financial information for employers. We find strong evidence of rent-sharing, with an elasticity of wages with respect to current profitability of the firm of 3-7%, arising mainly from firms in concentrated industries. On the other hand we find little evidence that bargaining lowers the return on investment. Instead, firm-level bargaining appears to split the rents after deducting the full cost of capital.

We evaluate the sources of wage losses of workers displaced due to firm closure by comparison of workers' wages before and after displacement. We decompose the sources of the wage losses into the contribution of firm, match quality, and job title fixed effects. Sorting into lower paying job titles represents the largest component of the monthly wage loss of displaced workers, accounting for 37 percent of the total average monthly wage loss compared to 31 percent for the firm and 32 percent for the match effects. With respect to the hourly wage losses, job title effects account for 46 percent of the total loss, while firm and match effects contribute in equal shares representing each 27 percent of the loss.

We study the link between firm productivity and the wages that firms pay. Guided by a search-matching model with large firms, worker and firm heterogeneity, and production complementarities, we infer firm productivity by estimating firm-level production functions. Using German data, we find that the most productive firms do not pay the highest wages. Worker transitions from high- to medium-productivity firms are on average associated with wage gains. Productivity sorting—that is, the sorting of high-ability workers into high-productivity firms—is less pronounced than the sorting into high-wage firms.

How important are firms for wage inequality in developing countries where structural unemployment is high? Research focused on contexts close to full employment has suggested a substantial role of firms in labor market inequality. Using matched employer–employee data from South Africa, I find that firms explain a larger share of wage variation than in richer countries. I consider drivers of this, documenting first a higher productivity dispersion as found for other developing countries. Secondly, I estimate the separations elasticity by instrumenting wages of matched workers with firm wages, and I find a low separations elasticity. This generates a high degree of monopsony, and the correspondingly high estimated rent-sharing elasticity helps explain the important role of firm wage policies in inequality. Monopsony may be driven by higher unemployment, and regional heterogeneity provides suggestive evidence for this. Such firm-level competitive dynamics may exacerbate inequality in developing countries more generally.

We document a strong trend towards more positive assortative wage sorting using Danish Matched Employer-Employee data from 1980 to 2006. The pattern is not due to compositional changes in the labor market and primarily occurs among high wage workers. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.

In this paper, we use matched employer-employee data from Denmark to analyze the extent to which firms’ productivity shocks are passed to workers wages. The richness of our dataset allows us to separately study continuing and non-continuing workers (switchers), to correct for selection, and to investigate how the passthrough varies across narrow population groups. Our results show a much larger degree of passthrough from firms’ shocks to workers’ wages than reported in previous research. On average, an increase of one standard deviation in firm-level TFP commands an increase of 3.0% in annual wages ($1500 USD for the average worker). Furthermore, we find that the effect of productivity shocks on wage growth for switchers is of larger magnitude relative to workers that stay in the same firm. Finally, we find large differences in the passthrough of productivity shocks to wages for workers of different income levels, ages, industries, and working in firms of different productivity levels. In the second part of our paper, we estimate a stochastic process of income that captures the salient features of the relation between firm-level shocks and the passthrough to workers' wages. We then embed the estimated stochastic process into a life-cycle consumption savings model with incomplete markets in order to evaluate the welfare and distributional implications of the passthrough from firm's TFP shocks to worker's wages we observe in the data.

We propose a novel methodology to uncover the sorting pattern in labor markets. We identify the strength of sorting solely from a ranking of firms by profits. To discern the sign of sorting, we build a noisy ranking of workers from wage data. Our test for the sign of sorting is consistent even with noisy worker rankings. We apply our approach to a panel dataset that combines social security earnings records with detailed financial data for firms in the Veneto region of Italy. We find robust evidence of positive sorting. The correlation between worker and firm types is about 52 percent. (JEL J24, J31, J41, J62, L25)

IZA DP No. 15033 JANUARY 2022 The Unequal Cost of Job Loss across Countries We document the consequences of losing a job across countries using a harmonized research design. Workers in Denmark and Sweden experience the lowest earnings declines following job displacement, while workers in Italy, Spain, and Portugal experience losses three times as high. French and Austrian workers face earnings losses somewhere in-between. Key to these differences is that Southern European workers are less likely to find employment following displacement. Loss of employer-specific wage premiums accounts for 40% to 95% of within-country wage declines. The use of active labor market policies predicts a significant portion of the cross-country heterogeneity in earnings losses. JEL Classification: J30, J63, J64

We use data from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics program to study the causal effects of location on earnings.Starting from a model with employer and employee fixed effects, we estimate the average earnings premiums associated with jobs in different commuting zones (CZs) and different CZ-industry pairs.About half of the variation in mean wages across CZs is attributable to differences in worker ability (as measured by their fixed effects); the other half is attributable to place effects.We show that the place effects from a richly specified cross sectional wage model overstate the causal effects of place (due to unobserved worker ability), while those from a model that simply adds person fixed effects understate the causal effects (due to unobserved heterogeneity in the premiums paid by different firms in the same CZ).Local industry agglomerations are associated with higher wages, but overall differences in industry composition and in CZ-specific returns to industries explain only a small fraction of average place effects.Estimating separate place effects for college and non-college workers, we find that the college wage gap is bigger in larger and higher-wage places, but that two-thirds of this variation is attributable to differences in the relative skills of the two groups in different places.Most of the remaining variation reflects the enhanced sorting of more educated workers to higher-paying industries in larger and higher-wage CZs.Finally, we find that local housing costs at least fully offset local pay premiums, implying that workers who move to larger CZs have no higher net-of-housing consumption.

We assess the presumption that social networks reinforce inequality by providing high-wage workers’ with preferential access to high-wage establishments. Our results based on very detailed Swedish register data contradict this view. We do show that high-wage job seekers tend to be connected to high-wage workers employed in high-wage establishments. Furthermore, social connections appear to directly cause the allocation of workers to jobs. But the sorting resulting from hires within social networks is less unequal than the sorting resulting from market hires, essentially because low-wage firms rely on social connections to hire high-wage workers.

We use employer-employee matched administrative data from Ohio to study the role of firm pay premiums in explaining the large, persistent earnings losses of displaced workers. We estimate that earnings for displaced workers from the mid-2000s are depressed by 22 percent after four years, consistent with prior work. Drawing upon empirical approaches from the displaced worker and firm heterogeneity literature, we then estimate how much of this earnings loss can be explained by the forfeiture of a favorable employer-specific pay premium. Our preferred estimate attributes one quarter (24 percent) of long-run earnings deficits to lost firm pay premiums. Such firm rents explain up to half the earnings deficits for those laid off from manufacturing firms and employers with particularly generous pay policies. We test for sensitivity to different samples from which we derive firm specific-pay premiums and definitions of displacement. Our estimates persist in a narrow range between 16 and 24 percent for the share explained by firm rents, adding to the evidence that firm rents do not explain the majority of earnings or wage losses sustained by displaced workers in the United States.

Job and wage mobility can arise from firms and workers learning about workers’ ability and from workers acquiring human capital with experience. To date, the relative importance of these two mechanisms is debated. Using administrative data from one firm, I estimate a structural model that integrates them. I find the direct effect of beliefs about ability on wages, which existing work has focused on, to be small. However, by improving the sorting of workers to the firm’s jobs, learning about ability is indirectly a crucial determinant of wage growth and dispersion.

Do the job-to-job moves of workers contribute to the cyclicality of employment growth at different types of firms? In this paper, we use linked employer-employee data to provide direct evidence on the role of job-to-job flows in job reallocation in the U.S. economy. To guide our analysis, we look to the theoretical literature on on-the-job search, which predicts that job-to-job flows should reallocate workers from small to large firms. While this prediction is not supported by the data, we do find that job-to-job moves generally reallocate workers from lower paying to higher paying firms, and this reallocation of workers is highly procyclical. During the Great Recession, this firm wage job ladder collapsed, with net worker reallocation to higher wage firms falling to zero. We also find that differential responses of net hires from non-employment play an important role in the patterns of the cyclicality of employment dynamics across firms classified by size and wage. For example, we find that small and low wage firms experience greater reductions in net hires from non-employment during periods of economic contractions.

In the past two decades, China’s manufacturing exports have grown spectacularly. U.S. imports from China have surged, while U.S. exports to China have increased more modestly, consistent with the two countries’ divergent current account imbalances. Using data on individual earnings by employer from the Social Security Administration, we examine how exposure to import competition aects the long-term earnings and employment trajectory of workers initially employed in manufacturing industries. We find that workers who in 1991 were employed in industries that experienced high subsequent levels of import growth garner lower cumulative earnings over the subsequent sixteen years (1992 through 2007) and are at substantially elevated risk of obtaining Social Security Disability Insurance benefits as the only recorded source of income in a given year. More exposed individuals spend less time working for their initial employers, less time working in their initial two-digit manufacturing industries, and more time working elsewhere in manufacturing and outside of manufacturing. Eects on earnings and employment are larger for individuals whose initial employers were relatively large, whose initial wages where below their firm’s average, and who in the pre-sample period worked part time or intermittently. We obtain similar results using alternative measures of trade exposure. Our findings suggest that there is significant worker-level adjustment cost to import shocks and that adjustment is highly uneven across individuals according their conditions of employment in the pre-shock period.

We use matched firm-worker panel data from France and Norway to consider observationally equivalent alternatives to the hypothesis that firms share product market rents with their workers in the form of higher wages. After documenting the main stylized facts, we find that neither the main statistical explanations (group effect in residuals and measurement error) nor sectoral shocks seem to be responsible for the observed correlation. Statistical-economic explanations (endogeneity of profits, omitted variable biases in terms of individual productive characteristics) are slightly more successful, as instrumentation reduces the significance level in France to 89% (via an increase in the standard error of the estimate). The most complete model, with unobserved heterogeneity in both time-invariant firm compensation policy and time-invariant individual characteristics, instrumental variables and a complete set of controls for worker observables and sectoral shocks renders the coefficient insignificant for France and weakens its significance for Norway and the presence of a more mobile labor force in France, although it may also be due to insufficient degrees of freedom.

Does opening a market to international trade affect the pattern of matching between firms and workers? This paper answers this question both theoretically and empirically in three parts. We set up a model of matching between heterogeneous workers and firms in which variation in the worker type at the firm level exists in equilibrium only because of the presence of search costs. When firms gain access to the foreign market, their revenue potential increases. When stakes are high, matching with the right worker becomes particularly important because deviations from the ideal match quickly reduce the value of the relationship. Hence, exporting firms select sets of workers that are less dispersed relative to the average. We then document a novel fact about the hiring decisions of exporting firms versus non-exporting firms in a French matched employer-employee dataset. We construct the type of each worker using both a traditional wage regression and a model-based approach and construct measures of the average worker type and worker type dispersion at the firm level. We find that exporting firms feature a lower type dispersion in the pool of workers they hire. This effect is comparable and larger than the common finding in the literature that exporters pay higher wages because, among other factors, they employ better workers. The matching between exporting firms and workers is even tighter in sectors characterized by better exporting opportunities as measured by foreign demand or tariff shocks. Finally, we show that revenue loss is lower relative to the optimum allocation for exporting and more productive firms. This analysis is suggestive of the potenti al presence of additional gains from trade due to improved sorting.

Abstract Financial sector wages have increased extraordinarily over the last decades. We address two potential explanations for this increase: (1) rising demand for talent and (2) firms sharing rents with their employees. Matching administrative data of Swedish workers, which include unique measures of individual talent, with financial information on their employers, we find no evidence that talent in finance improved, neither on average nor at the top. The increase in relative finance wages is present across talent and education levels, which together can explain at most 20% of it. In contrast, rising financial sector profits that are shared with employees account for up to half of the relative wage increase. The limited labour supply response may partly be explained by the importance of early-career entry and social connections in finance. Our findings alleviate concerns about “brain drain” into finance but suggest that finance workers have captured rising rents over time.

This paper investigates the impact that firms have on the amount of bonus payments employees receive from their employer. Bonus payments are an important component of a firm's pay regime and, like with wages, are subject to an interactional process of claims-making. Depending on the organizational environment, claims can be enforced more or less successfully by certain groups. Hence, we expect different effects depending on the organizational environment of a firm as well as interactions between individual attributes. We use four samples (1995, 2001, 2006, and 2010) of the German Structure of Earnings Survey (GSES), a large dataset linking employers to employees, employing unconditional quantile regression and detailed decomposition to trace the influence of three firm characteristics (mean human capital, stability, coverage by collective agreement) on bonus payments and the change of this relations between 1995 and 2010. We find that all three firm characteristics have considerable impact on bonuses and that the effects vary substantially along the bonus distribution. Over time, powerful employees seem to increase their share of the firm's revenue (rent sharing), while less powerful employees are less likely to secure their relatively small bonuses (rent destruction).

Wage and labor productivity di!er across firms, and more productive firms tend to pay higher wages. We consider a model that allows for di!erences in capital, employment and labor quality as well as rent sharing, all of which should help explain these observations. We estimate the model using detailed matched employer-employee data from the manufacturing sector in Denmark. The production function estimation is embedded in a structural equation system involving worker, firm, time, and occupation e!ects from an individual wage decomposition and accounting for labor input components that are substitutes and complements, while accommodating stochastically varying factor productivity. We find that both input heterogeneity and intrinsic di!erences in total factor productivity across firms are important explanations. In the case of Manufacturing, about 41% of the dispersion in log value added per worker is attributable to cross-firm di!erences in the levels of capital per worker, while another 39% of the variation stems from intrinsic TFP di!erences. Only 5% is associated with quality di!erences in the labor input. In the case of individual log wages, 70% of the variation is due to individual characteristics, whereas only 13% is attributable to firm di!erences. Our results suggest that there are major gains to reallocation of labor from less to more productive firms. Rent sharing enhances the reallocation process by inducing wage dispersion that motivates worker search. The relatively small contribution of firm heterogeneity to individual wage dispersion is thus consistent with the inecient allocation of labor across firms.

We measure the contribution of match quality to the wage growth experienced by job movers. We reject the exogenous mobility assumption needed to estimate a standard fixed-effects wage regression in the Danish matched employer-employee data. We exploit the sub-sample of workers hired from unemployment, for whom the exogenous mobility assumption is not rejected, to estimate firm fixed effects. We then decompose the variance of wage growth of all job movers. We find that 66% of the variance of wage growth experienced by job movers can be attributed to variance in match quality. Expected match quality growth is higher for higher-skilled occupations.

Assortative Matching between workers and firms provides evidence of the complementarities or substitutes in production. The presence of complementarities is important for policies that aim to achieve the optimal allocation of resources, for example unemployment insurance. We argue that using wage data alone, it is virtually impossible to identify whether Assortative Matching is positive or negative. Even though we cannot identify the sign of the sorting, we can identify the strength, i.e., the magnitude of the cross-partial, and the associated welfare loss. We show first that the wage for a given worker is non-monotonic in the type of his employer. This is due to the fact that in a sorting model, wages re ect the opportunity cost of mismatch. We show analytically that this non-monotonicity prevents standard form fixed effects to correlate with the true type of the form. We then propose an alternative procedure that measures the strength of sorting in the presence of search frictions. Knowing the strength of sorting facilitates the measurement of the output loss due to mismatch.

Using linked employer-employee data from Brazil, we document a large gender pay gap due to women working at lower-paying employers with better nonpay attributes.To interpret these facts, we develop an equilibrium search model with endogenous firm pay, amenities, and hiring.We provide a constructive proof of identification of all model parameters.The estimated model suggests that amenities are important for both men and women, that compensating differentials explain half of the gender pay gap, and that there are significant output and welfare gains from eliminating gender differences.However, equal-treatment policies fail to achieve those gains.

This paper estimates workers' preferences for firms by studying the structure of employer-to-employer transitions in U.S. administrative data. The paper uses a tool from numerical linear algebra to measure the central tendency of worker flows, which is closely related to the ranking of firms revealed by workers' choices. There is evidence for compensating differential when workers systematically move to lower-paying firms in a way that cannot be accounted for by layoffs or differences in recruiting intensity. The estimates suggest that compensating differentials account for over half of the firm component of the variance of earnings.

We develop a job ladder model with labor reallocation across firms and regions, and estimate it on matched employer-employee data to study the large and persistent real wage gap between East and West Germany. We find that the wage gap is mostly due to firms paying higher wages per efficiency unit in West Germany and quantify a rich set of frictions preventing worker reallocation across space and across firms. We find that three spatial barriers impede East Germans' ability to migrate West: migration costs, a preference to live in the East, and fewer job opportunities received from the West. The estimated model highlights that the spatial barriers needed to generate the large wage gap between East and West are small relative to the frictions preventing the reallocation of labor across firms. Therefore, policies that directly promote regional integration lead to smaller aggregate benefits than equally costly hiring subsidies within region.

We bring to bear a novel dataset covering the employment history of about 450 million individuals from 180 countries to study return migration and the impact of skilled international migration on human capital stocks across countries. Return migration is a common phenomenon, with 38% of skilled migrants returning to their origin countries within 10 years. Return migration is significantly correlated with industry growth in the origin and destination countries, and is asymmetrically exposed to negative firm employment growth. Using an AKM-style model, we identify worker and country-firm fixed effects, as well as the returns to experience and education by location and current workplace. For workers in emerging economies, the returns to a year of experience in the United States are 59-204% higher than a year of experience in the origin country. Migrants to advanced economies are positively selected on ability relative to stayers, while within this migrant population, returnees exhibit lower ability. Simulations suggest that eliminating skilled international migration would have highly heterogeneous effects across countries, adjusting total (average) human capital stocks within a range of -60% to 40% (-3% to 4%).

Worker mobility and wages have declined in the United States amid rising employer market power. I propose a theory of the labor market in which a decrease in employer competition, characterized by fewer firms per worker, drives the decline in worker mobility and wages. A finite and decreasing number of employers exert market power by excluding their offers from the outside options of their employees. This reduces the value of workers’ outside options and, consequently, their wages and transitions across employers. I quantify the model to explain the long-run decline in worker mobility and wages and examine its cross-sectional implications.

In labor markets with worker and firm heterogeneity, the matching between firms and workers may be assortative, meaning that the most productive workers and firms team up. We investigate this with longitudinal population-wide matched employer-employee data from Portugal. Using panel data methods, we quantify a firm-specific productivity term for each firm, and we relate this to the skill distribution of workers in the firm. We find that there is positive assortative matching, in particular among long-lived firms. Using skill-specific estimates of an index of search frictions, we find that the results can only to a small extent be explained by heterogeneity of search frictions across worker skill groups. © 2010 Elsevier B.V.

Abstract We analyse how labour flows respond to permanent idiosyncratic shifts in firm-level production functions and demand curves using very detailed Swedish micro data. Shocks to firms’ physical productivity have only modest effects on firm-level employment decisions. In contrast, we document rapid and substantial employment adjustments through hires and separations in response to firm-level demand shocks. The choice of adjustment margin depends on the sign of the shock: firms adjust through increased hires if these shocks are positive and through increased separations if the shocks are negative.

Abstract We analyze occupational polarization within and across firms using a census of matched employer–employee panel data from Finland in the period of 2000–2014. As in most industrialized countries, the Finnish occupational distribution has polarized over the last decades. Using decomposition analysis, we find that jobs involving low-level service tasks increase mostly through the entry dynamics, while the high-level abstract task share increases largely within continuing firms. Worker-level occupational mobility points to some skill upgrading within continuing firms, while labor force entry and retirement contribute the polarizing trend. Instrumental variables (IVs) regressions confirm that this occupational restructuring is affected by the globalization of economic activity, including trade in goods and services, offshoring and outsourcing. For example, firms that outsource tasks abroad are more prone to lay off production workers, while domestic outsourcing leads to a reduction of both cognitive and service employees.

Adjustment to trade liberalization is associated with substantial reallocation of labor across firms within sectors. This salient feature of the data is well captured by models of international trade with heterogeneous firms. In this paper we reconsider the adjustment of firms and workers to changes in trade costs, explicitly accounting for labor market frictions and the entire adjustment path from an initial to a final steady-state. The transitional dynamics exhibit rich patterns, varying across firms that differ in productivity levels and across workers attached to these firms. High-productivity exporters expand employment on impact. But among lower-productivity firms some close shop on impact, other fire some workers on impact and close shop at a later date, and still other firms gradually reduce their labor force and stay in the industry. In these circumstances jobs that pay similar wages ex-ante are not equally desirable ex-post, because after the trade shock high-productivity incumbents pay higher wages and provide more job security than low-productivity incumbents. After calibrating the model, we provide a quantitative assessment of the importance of various channels of adjustment. We find that gains from trade due to a decline in the consumer price index overwhelm losses from wage cuts, job destruction, and capital losses of incumbent firms, and that these losses are increasing in the extent of labor market frictions. ∗For useful comments we thank Kerem Cosar, Felix Tintelnot, Steve Redding, Richard Rogerson, Esteban Rossi-Hansberg, Ezra Oberfield, David Weinstein, Andrew Bernard, Pol Antras, and Dan Trefler, as well as seminar participants at Princeton, CREI, CIFAR, UBC, West Coast Trade Workshop at UCLA, ERWIT at the University of Oslo, and Barcelona GSE Summer Forum. We also than Ricardo Reyes-Heroles for excellent research assistance.

Combining confidential Census worker and firm data, we find three key results.First, employees at more productive firms earn higher pay at all earnings levels.Second, this pay-productivity relationship strengthens with seniority, doubling from an elasticity of 0.07 for pay on productivity for the median-paid employee to 0.15 for the top-paid employee.Consequently, more productive firms have higher within-firm inequality.Our data suggests this is driven by their greater adoption of aggressive performance-pay bonus and management schemes.Finally, the magnitude of this pay-performance slope suggests rising productivity can explain 40% of the rise in withinfirm inequality since 1980.

Abstract Using a linked employer–employee dataset covering large firms, we present new evidence on British wage inequality trends over the past two decades. Differences between firms in the average wages they paid did not drive these trends. Between 1996 and 2005, greater wage variance within firms accounted for 86% of the total increase in wage variance among employees. In the following decade, wage inequality between firms continued to increase, whereas overall wage dispersion decreased. Approximately all the contribution to inequality dynamics from estimated firm‐specific factors, throughout the employee wage distribution, disappears after accounting for the changing occupational content of wages.

Abstract In the present paper, I integrate frictional labor markets with on‐the‐job search into an otherwise standard heterogeneous firm model of intra‐industry trade. Most importantly, I show that the returns to workers' inter‐firm mobility are higher in a trade equilibrium than in autarky. Intuitively, by favoring large and productive firms, international trade amplifies the disparities in profitability between small and large firms. Hence, the returns to labor reallocation across firms rise. In view of the empirically observed higher inter‐firm mobility among high‐skill workers, this suggests a skill‐biased impact of trade liberalization.

I study how labor market power affects firm wage differences using German manufacturing sector firm-level data (1995-2016). In past decades, labor market power increasingly moderated rising between-firm wage differences. This is because high-paying firms possess high and increasing labor market power and pay wages below competitive levels, whereas low-wage firms pay competitive or even above competitive wages. Over time, large, high-wage, high-productivity firms generate increasingly large labor market rents while charging comparably low product markups. This provides novel insights on why such top firms are profitable and successful. Using micro-aggregated data covering most economic sectors, I validate key results for multiple European countries.

We consider sorting in the labor market, that is, whether high or low productivity workers and firms tend to match with each other, and how this varies cyclically using U.S. matched employer-employee data for recent decades. Although there is considerable disagreement in the nature and extent of assortative matching among different methods for ranking workers and firms, we consistently find that the productivity composition of workers and firms moves in opposite directions over the business cycle. During and after recessions, low-productivity workers leave the labor market, while low-productivity firms gain as a share of employment, so positive assortative matching is greatest in magnitude in the early stages of economic contractions. These results are consistent with differences between workers, rather than firms, driving the value of output, which we demonstrate using a model of labor market search.

This paper extends the "dynamic monopsony" Burdett-Mortensen model of wage posting and onthe-job search to incorporate granular employers with decreasing returns to scale.We provide a complete analytical characterization of the resulting equilibrium and show how to allow for firm heterogeneity, additional inputs, and product market power.As an application, we study noncompete agreements theoretically and quantitatively.A US ban would yield wage gains typically in the range of 0.8 3% depending on local conditions, with a baseline estimate of 0.9%, but these come with higher worker turnover and a mild decline in aggregate welfare.

Abstract Rising wage inequality in wealthy countries is disproportionately driven by widening differences in pay between workplaces, through increasingly homogenous workforces as well as widening differences in the pay of similar workers. While this is found consistently across countries, the variation in trends highlights the need to study institutional settings. This paper uses cross-national representative European data from the Structure of Earnings Survey to study the trends in wage inequality over time between and within firms, linking these to changes in structural and institutional factors. Indeed, common structural changes such as globalization and digitalization contribute to rising wage inequality across otherwise similar workers within and between establishments. However, the institutional context plays an important role: where employers’ pay setting is constrained through more biting minimum wages or multi-employer collective bargaining, this inequality is compressed and does not grow as much.

Abstract Recent studies have identified both occupations and organizations as important structures underpinning wage inequality in the labor market. In this article we investigate how the two structures might work together in explaining inequality. More specifically, we study how organizations affect between- and within-occupation inequality. Using a combination of Dutch linked employer-employee register data and the Dutch labor force survey, we find that organizations are more important in explaining wage differentials between occupations than wage inequality between workers with the same occupation. While organizations are far away from solely driving heterogeneity in pay among workers in the same occupation, we find that the sorting of high-paying occupations in high-paying firms (and vice versa) is an important mechanism by which both structures affect inequality. Our findings emphasize the importance of moving away from an isolated study of occupations or organizations towards an analytical integration of both structures for understanding wage inequality.

In a recent paper, Kremer & Maskin (QJE, forthcoming) develop an assignment model in which increases in the dispersion and mean of the skill distribution can lead simultaneously to increases in wage inequality and skill segregation. They then present evidence that, concurrent with rising wage inequality, wage segregation increased for production workers in the United States between 1975 and 1986. My paper argues that relying on wages as a proxy for skill may be problematic. Using a newly developed longitudinal dataset linking virtually the entire universe of workers in the state of Illinois to their employers, I decompose wages into components due, not only to person and firm heterogeneity, but also to the characteristics of their co-workers. Such "co-worker effects" capture the impact of a weighted sum of the characteristics of all workers in a firm on each individual employee’s wage. While rising wage segregation can result from greater skill segregation, it may also be due to changes in the variance of co-worker effects in the economy, or to changes in the covariance between the person, firm, and co-worker components of wages. Due to the limited availability of demographic information on workers, I rely on the person specific component of wages to proxy for co-worker "skills." Because these person effects are unknown ex ante, I implement an iterative estimation approach where they are first obtained from a preliminary regression that excludes any role for co-workers. Because virtually all person and firm effects are identified, the approach yields consistent estimates of the co-worker parameters. My estimates imply that a one standard deviation increase in both a firm’s average person effect and experience level is associated, on average, with wage increases of 3% to 5%. Firms that increase the wage premia they pay workers appear to do so in conjunction with upgrading worker quality. Interestingly, the average effect masks considerable variation in the relative importance of co-workers across industries. After allowing the co-worker parameters to vary across 2 digit industries, I find that industry average co-worker effects explain 26% of observed inter-industry wage differentials. Finally, I decompose the overall distribution of wages into components due to persons, firms, and coworkers. While co-worker effects do indeed serve to exacerbate wage inequality, the tendency for high and low skilled workers to sort non-randomly into firms plays a considerably more prominent role.

Using matched employer-employee data from France, we uncover an ICT boom-cohort discount on the long-term wage of the large cohort of skilled workers entering in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector during the late 1990s technology boom. Despite starting with 5% higher wages, these workers experience lower wage growth and end up with 6% lower wages fifteen years out, relative to similar workers who started outside the ICT sector. Other moments of the wage distribution are inconsistent with selection effects. These workers accumulate human capital early in their career that rapidly depreciates, implying that labor reallocation during technology booms can have long-lasting effects.

A model of informal training which combines learning from own experience and learning from others is proposed in this paper. It yields a closed-form solution that revises Mincer-Jovanovic's [Mincer, J., Jovanovic, B., 1981. Labor mobility and wages. In: Rosen, S. (Ed.), Studies in Labor Markets. Chicago University Press, Chicago, pp. 21-64] treatment of tenure in the human capital earnings function. We estimate the structural parameters of this non-linear model on a large French cross-section with matched employer-employee data. We find that workers on average can learn from others 10% of their own human capital on entering one plant, and catch half of their learning from others' potential in just 2 years. The private marginal returns to education are declining with education as more educated workers have less to learn from others and share the social returns of their own education with their less qualified co-workers. The potential for learning from others on the job varies across jobs and establishments, and this provides a new distinction between imitation jobs and experience jobs. Workers in imitation jobs, who learn most from others, tend to have considerably longer tenure than workers in experience jobs. Although workers in experience jobs can learn little from others, we find that they learn a lot by themselves. We document several analogies between the imitation jobs/experience jobs "dualism" and the primary/secondary jobs and firms' dualism implied by the dual labor market theory. However, our binary classification of jobs depicts the data more closely than the dual theory categorization into primary-type and secondary-type establishments. Competition prevails between jobs and firms but jobs differ by their learning technology.

Using data from the Canadian Employer-Employee Dynamics Database between 2001 and 2015, the authors examine the impact of firms' hiring and pay-setting policies on the gender earnings gap in Canada. Consistent with the existing literature and following Card, Cardoso, and Kline (2016), findings show that firm-specific premiums explain nearly one-quarter of the 26.8% average earnings gap between female and male workers. On average, firms' hiring practices, due to differences in the relative proportion of women hired at high-wage firms (known as sorting), and pay-setting policies, due to differences in pay by gender within similar firms, each explain approximately one-half of this firm effect. The compositional difference between the two channels varies substantially over a worker's life cycle, by parental and marital status, and across provinces.

Governments go to great lengths to attract foreign multinationals because they are thought to raise the wages paid to their employees (direct effects) and to improve outcomes at local domestic firms (indirect effects). We construct the first U.S. employer-employee dataset with foreign ownership information from tax records to measure these direct and indirect effects. We find the average direct effect of a foreign multinational firm on its U.S. workers is a 7 percent increase in wages. This premium is larger for higher skilled workers and for the employees of firms from high GDP per capita countries. We find evidence that it is membership in a multinational production network-instead of foreignness-that generates the foreign firm premium. We leverage the past spatial clustering of foreign-owned firms by country of owner-ship to identify the indirect effects. An expansion in the foreign multinational share of commuting zone employment substantially increases the employment, value added, and-for higher earning workers-wages at local domestic-owned firms. Per job created by a foreign multinational, our estimates suggest annual gains of 13,400 USD to the aggregate wages of local incumbents, twothirds of which are from indirect effects. Our estimates suggest that-via mega-deals for subsidies from local governments-foreign multinationals are able to extract a sizable fraction of the local surplus they generate.

The process of matching between firms and workers is an important mechanism in determining the distribution of wages. In a labor market characterised by large dispersion of workers' productivity and worker-firm complementarity, high quality firms have strong incentives to screen for the quality of workers. This process will increase the positive quality association of firm-worker matches known as positive assortative matching (PAM). Immigration in a local labor market, by increasing the variance of workers abilities, may drive stronger PAM between firms and workers. Using French matched employer-employee (DADS) data over the period 1995-2005 we document that positive supply-driven changes of immigrant workers in a district increased the strength of PAM. We then show that this association is consistent with causality, is quantitatively significant, and is associated with higher average productivity and firm profits, but also with higher wage dispersion. We also show that the increased degree of positive assortative matching is mainly reached by high-productive firms "losing" lower quality workers and "attracting" higher quality workers.

This paper examines how employee earnings at small firms respond to a cash flow shock in the form of a government R&D grant. We use ranking data on applicant firms, which we link to IRS W2 earnings and other U.S. Census Bureau datasets. In a regression discontinuity design, we find that the grant increases average earnings with a rent-sharing elasticity of 0.07 (0.21) at the employee (firm) level. The beneficiaries are incumbent employees who were present at the firm before the award. Among incumbent employees, the effect increases with worker tenure. The grant also leads to higher employment and revenue, but productivity growth cannot fully explain the immediate effect on earnings. Instead, the data and a grantee survey are consistent with a backloaded wage contract channel, in which employees of financially constrained firms initially accept relatively low wages and are paid more when cash is available.

We assess the sources and consequences of the gender pay gap using a combination of theory and measurement. We start by documenting three empirical facts. First, women are more likely than men to work at low-paying employers. Second, for women as for men, pay is not the sole determinant of workers’ revealed-preference rankings of employers. Third, both pay and the revealed-preference rank differ between women and men within the same employer. To interpret these facts, we develop an empirical equilibrium search model featuring endogenous gender differences in pay, amenities, and recruiting intensities across employers. The estimated model suggests that compensating differentials explain one fifth of the gender gap, that there are significant output and welfare gains from eliminating gender differences, and that an equal-pay policy fails to close the gender pay gap.

In this paper we analyse-theoretically and empirically-how the degree of private versus public ownership of firms affects the degree of rent sharing between firms and their workers. Using a particularly rich linked employer-employee dataset from Portugal, covering a large number of corporate ownership changes across a wide spectrum of economic sectors over more than 20 years, we find that rent sharing is significantly higher in firms with a larger share of private ownership. Estimates from our most preferred empirical specification suggest that an increase in the private ownership share of 10 percentage points increases (on average) the rent-sharing elasticity by 0.0002. Based on a theoretical analysis that incorporates union-firm wage bargaining and efficiency wage effects within the same modelling framework, this result cannot be explained by private firms being more profit oriented than public ones. However, the result is consistent with a scenario whereby privatisation leads to less job security for workers, implying stronger efficiency wage effects. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.

I build and estimate a dynamic structural model of sectoral choices with heterogeneous workers accumulating imperfectly transferable human capital. Utility costs provide an additional barrier to mobility. Estimated by simulated minimum distance on administrative data covering the population of Danish workers, costs are found to be in the range from 10% to 19% of average annual wages. Removing permanent unobserved heterogeneity increases the utility costs by an order of magnitude. I show that both the imperfect transferability of human capital and the utility costs are important in explaining the slow adjustment of the labour market following shocks to the economy.

Abstract We revisit the role of labour market institutions by showing how they affect the sharing of firm-specific rents between employers and employees. We look at an Italian wage indexation mechanism (‘Scala Mobile’) that compressed the distribution of wages, imposing real wage increases at the bottom of the distribution. After developing a simplified version of a search model with intra-firm bargaining and on-the-job search, we document that skilled workers received lower wage adjustments when employed at firms with many unskilled workers and they tended to move towards more skill-intensive firms. Moreover, the system drove the least skill-intensive firms out of the market.

Abstract We integrate into a unified framework the spatial and the employment dimensions of worker mobility, tracing workers across firms, across establishments, and across regions. Drawing upon the spatial dimension of internal labor markets in firms with multiple establishments in multiple locations, our results indicate that the contemporaneous wage premium to migration is around 3 percentage points. For the case of job switchers, we find that the return to regional migration is due to access to better jobs at the destination. We also document the existence of an urban premium for same‐employer migrants but for employer changes this premium is driven by selection.

In this paper, we survey the recent empirical literature on the effects of offshoring on wage, employment, and displacement. We start with an overview of the measurement of offshoring, organizing our discussion around the three key elements of offshoring: that it involves intermediate inputs for production (versus final goods for consumption); that it involves imported inputs (versus domestically produced ones); and that the inputs involved could have been produced internally within the same firm. We then briefly discuss the theories of offshoring and survey the literature that examines the wage effects of offshoring: the wave of studies using industry-level data; the wave using firm-level data; the wave using worker-level data; and the wave using matched worker-firm data. For each wave, we highlight the identification strategies used, critically assess its strengths and weaknesses, discuss its connections with theory, and draw out potential policy implications of its findings. Finally, we survey the literature that examines how offshoring affects employment and displacement. We highlight the recent development of a novel cohort-based approach that is specifically designed to address selection with displacement, and capable of identifying the overall effects of offshoring, including wage, displacement, and all other types of transitions. (JEL F23, J24, J31, J63, L24, M55)

We develop, identify, and estimate a model of imperfect competition in both labor and product markets. Our context is the US construction industry, where firms compete for workers, private market projects, and government procurements. Our empirical approach leverages bidding data from procurement auctions linked to employer-employee tax records. We find imperfect competition in both markets generates a total wage markdown of more than 30 percent and a total price markup of around 45 percent. By contrast, if one erroneously assumed a perfectly competitive product (labor) market, then one would conclude wages (prices) are marked down (up) by only 20 percent (16 percent). (JEL D21, D24, H76, J31, L13, L74)

Abstract Low-income countries’ share of global exports nearly tripled between 1990 and 2015, largely due to China’s emergence as an exporting powerhouse. Evidence from several European countries and the US shows that import competition from China differentially reduced employment and earnings for workers in more trade-exposed industries and regions. We show that manufacturing employment declined most dramatically in countries where import growth was not matched by a commensurate expansion of exports. We also provide new results for the UK which indicate that imports from China contributed to substantial declines in consumer prices alongside job losses in manufacturing. However, while the adverse labour market impacts were concentrated on specific groups of workers and regions, consumer benefits from trade were widely dispersed and of similar magnitude for high and low-income households. We argue that assistance targeted towards displaced workers and depressed areas would better help the losers of globalization than new import tariffs.

Abstract This paper integrates the insight that exporting firms are typically more productive and employ higher‐skilled workers into a directed search model of the labour market. The model generates a skill premium as well as residual wage inequality among identical workers. A trade liberalization increases the skill premium and likely increases residual inequality among high‐skilled workers. The calibrated model generates results consistent with the prior literature examining the effect of the Canada‐US Free Trade Agreement on the Canadian labour market: a significant decrease in employment in manufacturing, but only a small change in unemployment and wages.

Abstract This paper analyzes changes in within‐firm inequality of hourly wages arising from export shocks to exporting firms in Denmark. We provide causal evidence that export demand shocks increase within‐firm inequality. Decomposing overall inequality into within and between components for occupational and educational groups, the results show that exports lead to a significant increase in within‐group wage inequality but do not affect the between‐group component. We develop a partial equilibrium model, featuring heterogeneous workers, which rationalizes these observations and shows how export demand shocks induce a complementarity effect, leading to increases in wage inequality within firms.

The objective of this paper is to construct and quantitatively assess an equilibrium search model with on-the-job search and general human capital accumulation. In the model workers enter the labour market with different abilities and firms differ in their productivities. Wages are dispersed because of search frictions and workers' productivity differentials. The model generates a simple (log) wage variance decomposition that is used to measure the importance of firm and worker productivity differentials, frictional wage dispersion and workers' sorting dynamics. I calibrate the model using a sample of young workers for the UK. I show that wage inequality among low skilled workers is mostly due to differences in their productivities. Among medium skilled workers frictional wage dispersion and sorting dynamics are, together, as important as workers' productivity differentials. Differences in firms' productivities are also an important source of wage inequality for both skill groups and account for a large share of frictional wage dispersion. Quantitatively the model is able to reproduce the observed cross-sectional wage distribution, the average wage-experience profile and the amount of frictional wage dispersion observed in the data as measured by the Mean-min ratio.

We construct a new linked data set with over one thousand offshoring events by matching Trade Adjustment Assistance program petition data to confidential data on U.S. firm operations. We exploit these data to assess how offshoring affects domestic firm-level aggregate employment, output, wages and productivity. Consistent with heterogenous firm models where offshoring involves a fixed cost, we find that the average offshoring firm is larger and more productive than the average non-offshorer. After initiating offshoring, firms experience large declines in employment (46.2 per cent), output (38.5 per cent) and capital (28.8 per cent) relative to their industry peers. We find no significant change in average wages or in total factor productivity measures for offshoring firms. These results are consistent across two separate difference-in-differences (DID) approaches, an instrumental variables approach, and a number of robustness checks. Thus, we find offshoring to be a strong substitute for domestic activity in this large sample of offshoring events.

There is still no consensus on the causes of the increase in the variance of transitory earnings (earnings instability) in the United States. It is difficult to attribute the rise in instability to job mobility because there is no evidence of a concurrent increase in job turnover or separations. Using an error component model of the covariance structure of earnings on Panel Survey of Income Dynamics and Survey of Income and Program Participation data, this study shows that job mobility and the increase in the variance of wage changes upon job change accounts for a substantial part of the increase in earnings instability. The empirical evidence is consistent with the simulations of a search and matching model where an increase in the variance of productivity shocks increases on‐the‐job search and earnings instability among job changers while leaving job turnover approximately constant. ( JEL J21, J31)

Using administrative tax records from South Africa for the period 2011–14, I find that firm wage premia explain 25 per cent of the total wage variance, 60 per cent of the gender wage gap, and 40 per cent of the gap between workers in the middle and the bottom of the income distribution. Next, I argue that in contrast to the rent-sharing literature, many studies of monopsony fail to use firm-level wage variation. I address this by using the estimated firm wage premia to estimate how wages are related to rent-sharing and monopsony power. I find that the average worker switching from a firm in the 25th percentile to the 75th percentile in profitability is paid 32 per cent more; and that the same switch across the distribution of monopsony, as measured by the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index in industry-by-local labour market hires, decreases wages by 10 per cent on average. When monopsony is measured using a separations approach, I find a labour supply elasticity of 0.75, suggesting substantial wage-setting power. Finally, I provide additional evidence supporting the applicability of the monopsony model in explaining these results. Differences in labour supply elasticities across gender and income groups account remarkably well for the corresponding average gaps in firm wage premia, and unions substantially increase rent-sharing in firms.

The subdued wage growth observed over the last years in many countries has spurred renewed interest in monopsony views of the labour market. This paper is the first to measure the extent and robustness of employer labour-market power and its wage implications exploiting comprehensive matched employer-employee data. We find average (employment-weighted) Herfindhal indices of 800 to 1,100; and that less than 9% of workers are exposed to concentration levels thought to raise market power concerns. However, these figures can increase significantly with different methodological choices. Finally, when holding worker composition constant and instrumenting concentration, wages are found to be negatively affected by employer concentration, with elasticities of between -1.5% and -3%.

We estimate the wage effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) with universal firm-level and linked employer-employee panel data containing 4,926 foreign acquisitions in Hungary. Matching on pre-acquisition data and controlling for fixed effects for firms and detailed worker groups, we find 12-28 percent effects on average wages. The wage effect mostly reverses for 983 foreign acquisitions later divested to domestic owners. We find positive effects for all worker types, occupations, and wage quantiles. The evidence implies little role for either measurement problems or residual selection, but suggests a strong cross-firm association of FDI wage premia with similar differentials in productivity.

Financial sectorwages have increased extraordinarily over the last decades.We address two potential explanations for this increase: (1) rising demand for talent and (2) firms sharing rents with their employees. Matching administrative data of Swedish workers, which include unique measures of individual talent, with financial information on their employers, we find no evidence that talent in finance improved, neither on average nor at the top. The increase in relative finance wages is present across talent and education levels, which together can explain at most 20% of it. In contrast, rising financial sector profits that are shared with employees account for up to half of the relative wage increase. The limited labor supply response may partly be explained by the importance of early-career entry and social connections in finance. Our findings alleviate concerns about “brain drain” into finance but suggest that finance workers have captured rising rents over time.

Using Italian matched employer–employeedata, I examine how accounting for unobserved worker or firm heterogeneity can impact estimates of import competition's impact on industry-level gender wage gaps, and how this can be driven by changes in the composition of female workers and firms within affected industries. First, in wage regressions, I find that import competition lowers women's wages relative to men, but only in specifications that include worker or firm fixed effects. Accounting for these sources of heterogeneity matters because: (1) women that earn low wages are more likely than men to change industries or leave the sample, and (2) firms that employ women are more likely to exit and shrink due to import competition. My findings illustrate how, using data or methods that do not account for worker and firm heterogeneity, researchers can conclude that import competition can improve gender equality, when in fact gender equality is worsened.

Pay inequality stems both from firm pay-setting and from workers' individual characteristics. Yet, intergenerational mobility research focuses on transmission of individual traits, and has failed to test how firms shape the inheritance of inequality. We study this question using three decades of Swedish population register data, and decompose the intergenerational earnings correlation into firm pay premiums and worker effects. One quarter of the intergenerational earnings correlation at midlife is explained by sorting between firms with unequal pay. Employer or industry inheritance account for a small share of this firm-based earnings transmission. Instead, high-education and high-occupation workers disproportionately land at high-paying firms. Parental referral networks and the inheritance of industry and labor market context play a supplementary role. As workers with high-education or high-status jobs are increasingly also employed at high paying firms, firm sorting could become increasingly important to intergenerational earnings transmission.

We revisit the estimation of industry wage differentials using linked employer-employee data from the U.S. LEHD program. Building on recent advances in the measurement of employer wage premiums, we define the industry wage effect as the employment-weighted average workplace premium in that industry. We show that cross-sectional estimates of industry differentials overstate the pay premiums due to unmeasured worker heterogeneity. Conversely, estimates based on industry movers understate the true premiums, due to unmeasured heterogeneity in pay premiums within industries. Industry movers who switch to higher-premium industries tend to leave firms in the origin sector that pay above-average premiums and move to firms in the destination sector with below-average premiums (and vice versa), attenuating the measured industry effects. Our preferred estimates reveal substantial heterogeneity in narrowly-defined industry premiums, with a standard deviation of 12%. On average, workers in higher-paying industries have higher observed and unobserved skills, widening between-industry wage inequality. There are also small but systematic differences in industry premiums across cities, with a wider distribution of pay premiums and more worker sorting in cities with more highpremium firms and high-skilled workers.

Abstract Globalisation is a prominent driver of wage inequality in advanced economies, and wage differentials paid by the exporter vis‐à‐vis domestically oriented firms play an unmistakable role. In this paper, we measure and decompose the exporter wage gap into several explanatory components by estimating counterfactual distributions for the Spanish economy between 2006 and 2014. To measure the exporter wage gap, an extended Mincer‐type wage equation is estimated along different points of the wage distribution using Unconditional Quantile Regression. Then, we apply the technique of Fortin, Lemieux and Firpo to decompose the exporter wage gap. We find that workers earn higher wages if they work in an exporting firm and that these differences are not constant across the wage distribution: they are greater for middle and middle‐high wages and narrower at the extremes of the distribution. Moreover, the exporter wage gap increased during and after the Great Recession. Characteristics, especially those related to firm and job heterogeneity, play an important role in explaining the gap, mainly in the upper part of the wage distribution. Though in the lower part, wage structure also plays an important role. With some variation across periods, there is a consistent pattern in which occupation, sector and firm size lead to an exporter wage premium resulting in a more unequal wage distribution. These factors are partially compensated by other factors, such as the collective bargaining system.

We present a simple new method to decompose the wage effects of displacement into components due to differences in the way that displaced and non-displaced workers are sorted across higher- and lower-paying employers (a sorting effect), differences in the quality of worker–employer matches that they enter into (a matching effect), and differences in their unobservable characteristics (a selection effect). In an extended application, we apply our decomposition to understand how the determinants of displaced workers’ wages in Germany changed following the 2003–2005 Hartz reforms. We find that the wages of displaced workers fell substantially after the reforms, and that over 80 percent of the decline was because they found re-employment at lower-paying employers. Sorting into worse matches explains a smaller 5–9 percent of the wage decline experienced by men, and 12–23.5 percent of the female wage decline. Collectively, the sorting and matching channels explain almost all of the post-reform decline in displaced workers’ wages, and selection played little role.

Abstract We address the presence, magnitude, and composition of wage gains related to former co-workers and discuss the mechanisms that could explain their existence. Using Hungarian linked employer–employee administrative data and proxying actual co-workership with overlapping work histories, we show that the overall wage gain attributable to former co-workers consists of multiple elements: a contact-specific, an individual-specific, a firm-specific and a match-specific component. Former co-workers, besides the direct effect of their presence, may funnel individuals into high-paying firms, enhance the sorting of good quality workers into firms, and may contribute to the creation of better employer–employee matches. By introducing and applying a wage-decomposition technique, we demonstrate that there are non-negligible differences between linked and market hires in all empirically separable wage elements. By focusing on specific scenarios, we provide additional empirical evidence in favor of employee referral and information transmission as the main drivers of co-worker gains.

This paper considers inference on fixed effects in a linear regression model estimated from network data. An important special case of our setup is the two‐way regression model. This is a workhorse technique in the analysis of matched data sets, such as employer–employee or student–teacher panel data. We formalize how the structure of the network affects the accuracy with which the fixed effects can be estimated. This allows us to derive sufficient conditions on the network for consistent estimation and asymptotically valid inference to be possible. Estimation of moments is also considered. We allow for general networks and our setup covers both the dense and the sparse case. We provide numerical results for the estimation of teacher value‐added models and regressions with occupational dummies.

Abstract We study how domestic firms adapt to increased import competition from China. Using a Danish employer‐employee matched dataset covering firms over the 1995–2007 period, we find that import competition significantly increases manufacturing firms' expansion of their business activities in the service industry (partial servitization); their probability of offshoring production activities abroad and of exiting the market. Import competition, however, does not induce firms to cease all of their involvement in manufacturing production by completely switching into service sector (complete servitization). These findings are confirmed using various robustness tests as well as an analogous analysis of a Portuguese employer‐employee matched dataset.

The authors use three distinct methods to investigate the influence of industrial relations on firm wage premia in Germany. First, ordinary least squares (OLS) regressions for the firm effects from a two-way fixed-effects decomposition of workers’ wages reveal that average premia are larger in firms bound by collective agreements and in firms with a works council, holding constant firm performance. Next, recentered influence function (RIF) regressions show that premia are less dispersed among covered firms but more dispersed among firms with a works council. Finally, in an Oaxaca–Blinder decomposition, the authors find that decreasing bargaining coverage is the only factor they consider that contributes to the marked rise in premia dispersion over time.

We set up a general equilibrium model, in which offshoring to a low-wage country can lead to job polarisation in the high-wage country. Job polarisation is the result of a reallocation of labour across firms that differ in productivity and pay wages that are positively linked to their profits by a rent-sharing mechanism. Offshoring involves fixed and task-specific variable costs, and as a consequence it is chosen only by the most productive firms, and only for those tasks with the lowest variable offshoring costs. A reduction in those variable costs increases offshoring at the intensive and at the extensive margin, with domestic employment shifted from the newly offshoring firms in the middle of the productivity distribution to firms at the tails of this distribution, paying either very low or very high wages. We also study how the reallocation of labour across firms affects economy-wide unemployment. Offshoring reduces unemployment when it is confined to high-productivity firms, while this outcome is not guaranteed when offshoring is also chosen by low-productivity firms.

This chapter reviews the theory of monopsonistic wage setting, its empirical implications, and some puzzles the framework has struggled to explain.We begin by examining the fundamentals of monopsonistic wage determination.The core of the theory is a mapping from the distribution of worker outside options to wages.We study non-parametric shape restrictions that ensure this mapping is unique.Building on these results, we introduce a menu of tractable parametrizations of labor supply to the firm, some of which are shown to emerge naturally from equilibrium search models.Next, we review why wage markdowns do not necessarily signal inefficiency and discuss some criteria for assessing misallocation in a monopsony model with search frictions.Turning to the model's empirical implications, we examine how the magnitude of productivity-wage passthrough depends on the super-elasticity of labor supply to the firm and establish that compensating differentials for firm amenities depend on the curvature of the outside option distribution.We show that firm-specific shifts in either productivity or amenities can be used as instruments to identify labor supply elasticities and review strategies for estimating non-constant elasticities.We then consider extensions of the basic model involving third-degree wage discrimination and examine their ability to rationalize patterns of worker-firm sorting.Monopsony models traditionally assume that firms commit to posted wages.Relaxing this assumption, we develop a connection between the first-order conditions of the monopsony model and models of bargaining with incomplete information.These models explain why bilateral inefficiencies may persist in the presence of negotiation, yield predictions about the response of within-firm wage dispersion to productivity shocks, and suggest reasons why some productivity shifters may not constitute excludable instruments.Next, we endogenize productivity by allowing for efficiency wages, non-constant returns to scale, and price-cost markups.Empirical monopsony estimates often suggest that firms enjoy implausibly large profit margins.We argue that allowing for nonconstant labor supply elasticities and firm adjustment costs can potentially resolve this difficulty.Finally, we review why the strong passthrough of minimum wages to product prices presents a challenging puzzle for standard monopsony models and discuss potential reconciliations to this puzzle involving firm heterogeneity, quality upgrading, and lumpy price adjustment.

The worker-job surplus -the sum of the worker's and the employer's net values of an employment relationship -is the object that drives decisions in most matching models of the labor market. In this paper, we develop a theory-based empirical method to determine which of the observable worker and job characteristics impact the worker-job surplus in the data. To do so, we exploit the mobility choices of employed workers. Our method further indicates whether workers sort along those surplus-relevant attributes when searching for jobs. It also provides a test of the commonly used single-index assumption, according to which worker and job heterogeneity can each be summarized by scalar indices. We implement our method on US data using the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the O*NET. The results suggest that a relatively sparse model underlies the data. On the job side, a cognitive and an interpersonal skill requirement impact the surplus along with the (dis)amenity of work duration as well as the workplace size. On the worker side, we find that most of the relevant characteristics are symmetric to the selected job requirements. We reject the existence of a single-index representation of these relevant multi-dimensional worker and job attributes. We then use our results in a new approach to defining the economy's labor submarkets, highlighting a potentially important application of our methodology.

Purpose This purpose of this paper to examine how profit sharing depends on the underlying profitability of firms. More precisely, motivated by theoretical research on fair wages and unionized labor markets, profit sharing is estimated for six different profitability categories: positive, increasing, positive and increasing, negative, decreasing and negative or decreasing. Design/methodology/approach The paper exploits a high-quality linked employer–employee data set covering the universe of Finnish workers and firms. Endogeneity of profitability and self-selection of firms in different profitability categories are accounted for by an instrumental variables approach. The panel-structure of the data is used to control for unobserved heterogeneity (spell and individual fixed effects). Findings Profits are shared if firms are profitable or become more profitable. The wage-profit elasticity varies between 0.03 and 0.13 in such firms. However, profits are not shared if firms make losses or become less profitable. There is no downward wage adjustment. Research limitations/implications Because of the instrumental variables approach the question of external validity arises. Further empirical research on profit sharing with an explicit focus on firm profitability is warranted. The results of the paper indicate a connection between rent sharing and wage rigidity, as suggested by union and fair wage theory. Originality/value This is the first paper to consistently estimate the extent of profit sharing depending on the underlying profitability of firms.

Employer investment, social closure, peer networks: substantial research highlights differences in informal social structure across workplaces. Yet studies of pay inequality between firms have largely neglected these differences in favor of more easily measurable features like firm size or ownership structure. We show how three types of workplace social relations shape firm pay setting: employer relational investment that supports higher wages, social closure as a source of bargaining power, and amenity ties that lock workers into jobs despite low pay. To operationalize these concepts, we draw on text data from a large archive of job reviews. Variance decomposition analyses show that differences in social relations account for up to 20% of overall inequality in between-firm pay premiums and 7% of residual inequality. Differences in informal social organization, and not just formal organization, predict pay differences between firms.

Using two data sets derived from German administrative data, including a linked employer-employee data set, we investigate the cyclicality of worker and job flows.The analysis stresses the importance of two-sided labour market heterogeneity in this context, taking into account both observed and unobserved characteristics.We find that small firms hire mainly unemployed workers, and that they do so at the beginning of an economic expansion. Later on in the expansion, hirings more frequently result from direct job-to-job transitions, with employed workers moving to larger firms. Contrary to our expectations, workers moving to larger firms do not experience significantly larger wage gains than workers moving to smaller establishments. Furthermore, our econometric analysis shows that the interaction of unobserved heterogeneities on the two sides of the labour market plays a more important role for employed job seekers than for the unemployed.

We quantify and explain the firm responses and worker impacts of foreign demand shocks to domestic production networks. To capture that firms can be indirectly exposed to such shocks by buying from or selling to domestic firms that import or export, we use Belgian data with information on both domestic firm-to-firm sales and foreign trade transactions. Our estimates of firm responses suggest that Belgian firms pass on a large share of a foreign demand shock to their domestic suppliers, face upward-sloping labor supply curves, and have sizable fixed overhead costs in labor. Motivated and guided by these findings, we develop and estimate an equilibrium model that allows us to study how idiosyncratic and aggregate changes in foreign demand propagate through a small open economy and affect firms and workers. Our results suggest that the way the labor market is typically modeled in existing research on foreign demand shocks-with no fixed costs and perfectly elastic labor supply-would grossly understate the decline in real wages due to an increase in foreign tariffs.

We develop a two-country labor search model in which a multinational firm engages in production sharing by hiring both domestic and foreign labor to produce a final good. A key innovation to the model is the sequential nature of domestic and foreign labor markets in combination with fixed costs of entry. These features introduce an outside option for the multinational in its wage negotiations, by allowing shifts of production overseas. Using this framework, we derive a model-based estimate of the effect of the threat of offshoring on global wages and labor market allocations. In the short run, when firm entry is impeded from fully adjusting, we find that the threat of offshoring has sizable effects: domestic wages are lower, there are fewer jobs and the unemployment rate is higher. This occurs even though the actual amount of offshoring is very small in the economy. Moreover, in the short run, the threat of offshoring mitigates the responsiveness of the wage to underlying shocks, with the threat of offshoring operating like a real rigidity. In contrast, when entry is free to adjust over the long run we find that the threat of offshoring has a minimal effect on the economy.

Purpose – Up to date, it remains an unresolved issue how firms shape inequality in interaction with mechanisms of stratification at the individual and occupational-level. Accordingly, the authors ask whether workers of different occupational classes are affected to different degrees by between-firm wage inequality. In light of the recent rise of overall wage inequality, answers to this question can contribute to a better understanding of the role firms play in this development. The authors argue and empirically test that whether workers are able to benefit from firms’ internal or external strategies for flexibility depends on resources available at the individual and occupational level. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Matched employer-employee data from official German labour market statistics are used to estimate firm-specific wage components, which are then regressed on structural characteristics of firms. Findings – Between-firm wage effects of internal labour markets are largest among unskilled workers and strongly pronounced among qualified manual workers. Effects are clearly smaller among classes of qualified and high-qualified non-manual workers but have risen sharply for the latter class from 2005 to 2010. Social implications – The most disadvantaged workers in the labour market are also most contingent upon employers’ increasingly heterogeneous policies of recruitment and remuneration. Originality/value – This paper combines insights from sociological and economic labour market research in order to formulate and test the new hypothesis that between-firm wage effects of internal labour markets are larger for unskilled than for qualified workers.

We use detailed administrative data to study how acquisitions — specifically the acquisition of a plant by a firm with a similar plant in the same local labor market — affect workers. Using an event study framework with a control group of workers at unaffected plants, we find that acquisitions lead to employment losses for workers initially employed at the acquired firm, mainly associated with labor force withdrawals by older female workers. At the same time we find evidence of a rise in wages for workers initially employed at targets and at the acquiring firm who remain with the combined enterprise, concentrated among lower-wage workers. Our findings suggest that consolidations lead to a reduction in overall employment but a rise in rents per worker that lead to a pattern of losers and winners in the labor market.

Several studies have documented a positive and causal relationship product or process innovation - and labor productivity. Given the links between labor productivity and wages, a likely implication of this positive relationship is that innovation is associated with higher wages of more productive firms. This paper explores the relationship between innovation and wages using Brazil's employer-employee census and a novel measure of innovation derived from the share of technical and scientific occupations of workers in the firm. The results show a robust and positive wage premium associated with innovative firms. The decomposition of this innovation-related wage premium suggests a series of important stylized facts: (i) the innovation wage premium is larger for manufacturing but also positive and significant for agriculture and services; (ii) it is larger for large firms, but also positive and significant for all firm size categories including micro firms; and (iii) it is larger for medium- and low-skill occupations, although this depends on the use of firm fixed effects. More importantly, the paper explores the causality between innovation and wages and finds empirical support for the ideas that "self-selection" firms that innovate already pay higher wages before becoming innovators - and increases in wages associated with starting innovation activity, which are persistent for three years after firms start innovating

The long literatures on the determinants of wage rates at the individual level and on the empirical relation between productivity and wage rates intersect when attention is focused on longitudinally linked employer-employee data. We estimate separate statistical components of wage rates associated with the observable individual characteristics, unobservable individual heterogeneity and unobservable employer heterogeneity. We define general human capital as the portable components of the full-time, full-year wage rate. Within each employer in the linked sample, we create employer-aggregates of the general human capital. We then estimate the relation between sales per employee, general human capital, and employer wage heterogeneity using micro data for the employing firms. The results reveal direct statistical links between the productivity outcome (sales/worker) and general human capital, controlling for firm-specific wage rate heterogeneity, which can be interpreted as specific human capital or as part of a firm-specific compensation strategy.

Using a population-wide Danish Matched Employer-Employee panel from 1980-2006, we document a strong trend towards more positive assortative wage sorting. The correlation between worker and firm fixed effects estimated from a log wage regression increases from -0.07 in 1981 to .14 in 2001. The nonstationary wage sorting pattern is not due to compositional changes in the labor market, primarily occurs among high wage workers, and comprises 41 percent of the increase in the standard deviation of log real wages between 1980 and 2006. We show that the wage sorting trend is associated with worker reallocation via voluntary quits.

Abstract This study analyzes the relationships among wages, firm size, and profit sharing schemes. We develop a simple theoretical model and explore the relationship empirically using high‐quality panel data. The theoretical model shows that the firm‐size wage premium decreases in the presence of profit sharing. The empirical results based on rich matched employee‐employer data for private sector wage earners in Finland show that the firm‐size wage premium is modest, and it becomes negligible when we account for profit sharing and covariates describing assortative matching and monopsony behavior. The analysis suggests that profit sharing schemes embody effects of firm‐specific unobservables that raise productivity, support rent sharing, and boost wages.

,

In this paper, we follow on the seminal work of Altonji and Shakotko (1987) and Topel (1991) and reinvestigate the returns to seniority in the U.S. These papers specify a wage function, in which workers’ wages can change through two channels: (a) returns to their seniority; and (b) returns to their labor market experience. We start from the same wage equation as in previous studies, and, following our theoretical model, we explicitly include a participation-employment equation and an interfirm mobility equation. The employment and mobility decisions define the individual’s experience and seniority. Because experience and seniority are fully endogenized, we introduce into the wage equation a summary of the workers’ entire career and past jobs. The three-equation system is estimated simultaneously using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). For all three education groups that we study, returns to seniority are quite high, even higher than what was previously obtained by Topel. On the other hand, the returns to experience appear to be similar to those previously found in the literature.

Abstract This article studies efficiency in a general class of search models where both unemployed and employed workers search for better jobs and can meet multiple firms simultaneously. Employers can respond to outside offers and wages are a weighted average of the productivities of the current employer and a credible poaching firm. I derive a condition that balances firms' bargaining power and their meeting externality. This condition ensures efficiency of both worker turnover and firm entry. Finally, the efficiency condition unifies and extends many of the results on the efficiency of equilibrium search models.

This paper uses a two-country dynamic general equilibrium model to consider how, following a trade cost shock, multinational firms’ offshoring decision and the countries’ different factor endowments affect wage inequality between high- and low-skilled workers in the home country. Highlighting task-offshoring, heterogeneous firms, and factor proportions, the study sheds light on how offshoring shapes wage inequality along different time horizons. While the paper's focus is the relationship between the U.S. (home country) and China (foreign country), its findings are more broadly relevant. The three main findings are these: First, both intensive and extensive margins of offshoring contribute to the widening wage gap, with the latter playing a more important role in the medium run than it does in the initial stage after the trade cost shock. Second, endogenous firm entry raises wages for both high-skilled and low-skilled workers while narrowing the wage gap between the two groups over time. Third, whether firms offshore to a foreign country like Mexico, where the supply of low-skilled laborers is moderately larger than in the home country, or to a country like China, where the supply of low-skilled laborers is vastly larger, makes scant difference to wage inequality in the long run. However, the latter is more beneficial to firm entry, product variety, and consumption.

This paper examines between- (inter) and within- (intra) firm wage inequality using rich employer-employee data for 12 European countries. We confirm that much overall wage inequality is observed within sectors and within occupations. The share of the within- and between-firm components in overall wage inequality varies across countries. We estimate the link between involvement in global value chains (GVCs) and wages differentiating into the within- and between-firm components and test the hypothesis that there is a different effect of GVCs on wages depending on the position in a value chain (close to or far from the final demand). The results indicate that the between-firm wage component is the main channel through which involvement in global value chains is materialised. However, the exact sign of the relationship between GVC growth and wages (conditioned on upstreamness) is country-heterogeneous albeit its marginal economic significance.

Using confidential linked firm-level trade transactions and census data between 1997 and 2012, we provide new evidence on how American firms without foreign affiliates adjust employment and wages as they adapt to import competition from low-income countries. We provide stylized facts on the input sourcing strategies of these domestic firms, contrasting them with multinationals operating in the same industry. We then investigate how changes in firm input purchases from low-income countries as well as domestic market import penetration from these sources are correlated with changes in employment and wages at surviving domestic firms. Greater offshoring by domestic firms from low-income countries correlates with larger declines in manufacturing employment and in the average production workers’ wage. Given the negative association, however, the estimated magnitudes are small, even for a narrow measure of offshoring that includes only intermediate goods. Import penetration of U.S. markets from these sources is associated with relatively larger changes in employment for arm's length importing firms, but has no significant correlation with employment changes at firms that do not trade. Given differences in the degree of both offshoring and import penetration, we find substantial variation across industries in the magnitude of changes associated with low-income country imports.

Using a longitudinal matched employer-employee data set for Portugal over the 1986-2005 period, this study analyzes the heterogeneity in wages responses to aggregate labor market conditions for newly hired workers and existing workers. Accounting for both worker and firm heterogeneity, the data support the hypothesis that entry wages are much more procyclical than current wages. A one-point increase in the unemployment rate decreases wages of newly hired male workers by around 2.8% and by just 1.4% for workers in continuing jobs. Since we estimate the fixed effects, we were able to show that unobserved heterogeneity plays a non-trivial role in the cyclicality of wages. In particular, worker fixed effects of new hires and separating workers behave countercyclically, whereas firm fixed effects exhibit a procyclical pattern. Finally, the results reveal, for all workers, a wage-productivity elasticity of 1.2, slightly above the one-for-one response predicted by the Mortensen-Pissarides model.

This paper examines workplace peer effects in two directions, leveraging employer‐employee data for Italy. First, using a novel estimation approach and addressing endogenous worker‐peer sorting, we estimate that a 10% increase in peer quality raises one's wage by 1.8% in the next year. The effect declines to 0.7% after 5 years. Second, in an event study around mobility episodes, we quantify wage changes associated with the entry and leave of high‐quality and low‐quality workers. Hiring high‐quality workers positively affects peer wages, as does separating from low‐quality workers. Movers experience immediate gains upon moving to high‐quality peer groups.

Why do women's wages grow more slowly than men's? Theory indicates that wages grow over the lifecycle as workers progress up an internal "career ladder, " and as they switch firms and move up the "job ladder" to higher-paying firms. In this paper, we use employer-employee linked data from Sweden to decompose cumulative wage growth of men and women at each age into wage gains associated with (1) firm changes, (2) large discrete wage gains relative to one's co-workers -- which we call promotions -- and (3) interim (non-promotion) growth. While women switch firms at almost identical rates as men over the lifecycle, they have substantially lower promotion rates at all ages. Though relatively rare, promotions are the largest driver of wage growth by 45 for both men and women. Gender differences in promotion-related growth account for around 73 to 83% of the differences in lifecycle wage growth of college-educated men and women from ages 25 to 45. Differences in wage growth associated with firm changes account for 28%, while interim, non-promotion growth is slightly higher for women. Gender differences in sorting across firms with steeper vs. flatter wage structures explain only about 10% of differences in promotion probability. Lastly, we study hours worked and the evolution of the promotion gap with time to first birth. We use our findings to explain why childbirth penalties for women are so large, immediate and persistent; why gender wage differentials vary across professions; and what contributes to gender differences in estimated firm wage premiums.

We present evidence that is consistent with large disparities across firms in their on-the-job learning opportunities using administrative datasets from Brazil and Italy. We categorize firms into discrete “classes”—which our conceptual framework interprets as skill-learning classes—using a clustering methodology that groups together firms with similar distributions of unexplained wage growth. Mincerian returns to experience vary widely across experiences acquired in different firm classes. Four tests leveraging firm movers, occupation/industry switchers, hiring wages, and displaced workers point toward a portable and general human capital interpretation. Heterogeneous employment experiences explain an important share of wage variance by age 35.

In the wake of the Melitz (Econometrica 71(6):1695–1725, 2003) model of heterogeneous firms in international trade, new theoretical models arose that try to assess the impact of trade on wage inequality within sectors, a feature that neoclassical trade theory cannot sufficiently explain. Based on the predictions of Helpman et al. (Econometrica 78(4):1239–1283, 2010), we use the LIAB, a German linked employer–employee panel dataset, in order to provide empirical evidence that wage inequality first increases and then decreases with gradual trade liberalization.

Abstract After three decades of persistently high income inequality, from 2001 onwards Brazil experienced a downward inequality trend followed by rising household income growth. Both movements lasted until 2015. This work synthesizes the results of six papers that describe the evolution of Brazilian income distribution. A common approach pursued was to jointly assess inequality, mean income, and social welfare rates of growth. We use a vast array of datasets to fill the gaps found in the literature. Top incomes’ movements reduced income inequality fall but increased mean income growth, suggesting challenges in measuring and interpreting inequality changes. Overall, inequality fall was driven by labour earnings through firm-specific effects. Rising schooling and falling returns also played a role, especially if parents’ educational background is taken into account. Missing income values did not affect inequality measures. Direct and indirect taxes increased inequality trends, while official monetary benefits helped to reduce them.

In this paper, we investigate gender differences in workers’ career development within and outside the firm to explain the existence of gender wage gaps. Using Danish employer–employee matched data, we find that good female workers are more likely to move to better firms than men but are less likely to be promoted. Furthermore, these differences in career advancement widen after the first child is born. Our findings suggest that career impediments in certain firms cause the most productive female workers to seek better jobs in firms in which there is less gender bias.

This paper shows that some managers pay higher wage premiums to their workers and these managers are targets of M&As. We use a manager-firm-worker matched dataset covering the population of Denmark from 1995 to 2011 and develop a novel framework to measure manager styles in wage-setting by tracking workers and managers across firms over time. We find that individual managers do matter for wages, and variation in manager fixed effects can explain a significant part of wage differences between firms. Establishments with high wage premiums due to generous managers are more likely to be acquired, and experience higher manager turnover and larger wage declines after acquisitions. Lower wages have little effect on firms’ productivity, and therefore represent a transfer from workers to shareholders. The replacement of high-paying managers accounts for almost all of the wage decline and about half the shareholder gains in all M&As, suggesting that rent extraction might be a major motive for merger transactions. JEL codes: G34; G30; J31; M52; J50; D22 ∗Alex Xi He: University of Maryland. Email: ahe@rhsmith.umd.edu. Daniel le Maire: Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen. Email: daniel.le.maire@econ.ku.dk. We thank David Autor, Daron Acemoglu and David Thesmar for their invaluable advice and generous help at all stages of this project. We also thank Josh Angrist, Tania Babina, Sydnee Caldwell, Andrew Garin, Sabrina Howell, Holger Mueller, Simon Jäger, David Matsa, Nancy Rose, Antoinette Schoar, Kathryn Shaw, Geoffrey Tate, John Van Reenen, as well as seminar participants at MIT, University of Chicago, University of Utah, University of Toronto, LBS, HKUST, University of Hong Kong and University of Maryland for helpful suggestions. Alex Xi He gratefully acknowledges financial support from the George and Obie Shultz Fund.

We evaluate the bias from endogenous job mobility in fixed-effects estimates of worker- and firm-specific earnings heterogeneity using longitudinally linked employer-employee data from the LEHD infrastructure file system of the U.S. Census Bureau. First, we propose two new residual diagnostic tests of the assumption that mobility is exogenous to unmodeled determinants of earnings. Both tests reject exogenous mobility. We relax the exogenous mobility assumptions by modeling the evolution of the matched data as an evolving bipartite graph using a Bayesian latent class framework. Our results suggest that endogenous mobility biases estimated firm effects toward zero. To assess validity, we match our estimates of the wage components to out-of-sample estimates of revenue per worker. The corrected estimates attribute much more of the variation in revenue per worker to variation in match quality and worker quality than the uncorrected estimates.

We study the importance of spatial firm sorting for inequality both between and within local labor markets. We develop a novel model of spatial firm sorting, in which heterogeneous firms first choose a location and then hire workers in a frictional local labor market. Firms' location choices are guided by a fundamental trade-off: Operating in productive locations increases output per worker, but sharing a labor market with other productive firms makes it hard to poach and retain workers, and hence limits firm size. We provide conditions under which there is positive firm sorting, with more productive firms settling in more productive locations. We show that positive firm sorting increases both the mean and the dispersion of wages in productive markets relative to less productive ones. The main mechanism is that firm sorting steepens the job ladder in productive places. We estimate our model using administrative data from Germany and identify firm sorting from a novel fact: Average local labor shares are lower in productive locations, which indicates a higher concentration of top firms with strong monopsony power. We infer that there is positive sorting of firms across space. Quantitatively, firm sorting can account for at least 16% of the spatial variation in mean wages and at least 38% of the variation in within-location wage dispersion.

Using a novel 15-year data set on surgeon adoption of a complex surgical innovation in the English National Health Service and an identification strategy based on surgeon mobility, this paper disentangles three channels of coworker influence on innovation diffusion: (1) peer network size, (2) influential “key players,” and (3) cumulative peer adoption. We find that a one standard deviation in peer connections boost innovation by 16%. Key players can either amplify or dampen diffusion, and peer adoption has a greater impact on less experienced individuals. These results highlight the value of targeting training to high impact network members to speed up diffusion. This work advances our understanding of how professional networks shape innovation diffusion, with implications for technology implementation. This paper was accepted by Stefan Scholtes, healthcare management. Funding: This work was supported by the European Research Council (ANR-17-EURE-0010, POEMH, Advanced Investigator Award HealthCareLabour REP-SCI-788529), the Australian Research Council (Discovery Project DP220101043) and the Health Foundation (Efficiency Research Programme). Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.00496 .

We investigate learning at the workplace. To do so, we use German administrative data that contain information on the entire workforce of a sample of establishments. We document that having more highly paid coworkers is strongly associated with future wage growth, particularly if those workers earn more. Motivated by this fact, we propose a dynamic theory of a competitive labor market where firms produce using teams of heterogeneous workers that learn from each other. We develop a methodology to structurally estimate knowledge flows using the full-richness of the German employer-employee matched data. The methodology builds on the observation that a competitive labor market prices coworker learning. Our quantitative approach imposes minimal restrictions on firms' production functions, can be implemented on a very short panel, and allows for potentially rich and flexible coworker learning functions. In line with our reduced form results, learning from coworkers is significant, particularly from more knowledgeable coworkers. We show that between 4 and 9% of total worker compensation is in the form of learning and that inequality in total compensation is significantly lower than inequality in wages.

"Using administrative data from Germany, this paper analyzes the relation between wages and past and current labor market conditions. Specifically, it explores whether the data is more consistent with implicit contract models (Beaudry/DiNardo, 1991) or a matching model with on-the-job search and cyclical selection (Hagedorn/Manovskii, 2013). The data suggests that wages are related to past labor market conditions as contract theories postulate. However, past labor market conditions also affect contemporaneous wages through the evolution of the match qualities over a worker's job history - the main hypothesis of the selection model. Refining the selection model by taking into account within company job regrading, we find that wages of workers who switched employers and occupations at the same time respond stronger to the cycle than wages of job stayers. In contrast, wages of workers who only switch employers or occupations are not more cyclical than wages of workers who stay at their previous employer and in their previous occupation." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

We use linked longitudinal data on employers and employees to estimate how the 2003-2005 Hartz reforms affected the wages of displaced German workers after they returned to work. We also present a simple new method to decompose the wage effects into components attributable to selection on unobservables, and to changes in the way that displaced workers are sorted across firms and worker-firm matches upon re-employment. We find that the Hartz reforms substantially reduced the wages of displaced workers after their return to work. Women experienced smaller wage losses than men. For both sexes, over 80 percent of the increased wage loss was because displaced workers found re-employment in lower-wage firms after the reforms. A disproportionate share of these low-wage firms offer temporary employment services to other firms, and we document a large increase in post-displacement employment in the temporary work sector after the reforms. Sorting into worse matches with employers explains a smaller 5-9 percent of the wage loss experienced by men, and 12.5-23 percent of the female wage loss. Collectively, the sorting and matching channels explain almost all of the Hartz reforms' effect on post-displacement wages.

We use recent matched employer-employee data to directly test if white workers have a taste for racial discrimination in Britain. We formally introduce individual and firm heterogeneity into the discrimination model used by Becker (1957, 1971) which we extend to generate predictions consistent with an employee taste for discrimination. We argue firstly that white employees with a taste for discrimination should report lower levels of job satisfaction the larger the proportion of ethnic minorities at their workplace. Secondly, white employees would have to be compensated by higher wages if required to work alongside ethnic minority co-workers. Both hypotheses are clearly supported for white males in our data, after comprehensively controlling for individual, job, and workplace characteristics. The white male wage premium for working amongst only ethnic minority co-workers, as compared to working only with whites, is about 12%. Importantly, it appears that neither of these effects operates via realised racial prejudice at the workplace or white employees' feelings concerning their job security.

We develop a spectral approach for identifying and estimating average counterfactual outcomes under a low-rank factor model with short panel data and general outcome missingness patterns. Applications include event studies and studies of outcomes of "matches" between agents of two types, e.g. people and places, typically conducted using less-flexible Two-Way Fixed Effects (TWFE) models of outcomes. Given finite observed outcomes per unit, we show our approach identifies all counterfactual outcome means, including those not identified by existing methods, if a particular graph algorithm determines that units' sets of observed outcomes have sufficient overlap. Our analogous, computationally efficient estimation procedure yields consistent, asymptotically normal estimates of counterfactual outcome means under fixed-$T$ (number of outcomes), large-$N$ (sample size) asymptotics. When estimating province-level averages of held-out wages from an Italian matched employer-employee dataset, our estimator outperforms a TWFE-model-based estimator.

Kutatásunk célja annak megmutatása, hogy a volt munkakapcsolatok figyelemre méltó hatást gyakorolnak a munkahelyváltó egyének kezdőbérére, a későbbi bérek pályájára, illetve az állásvesztés valószínűségére. Az elemzés adminisztratív államigazgatási adatbázison alapul, mely a 2003–2011 közötti időszakra vonatkozóan tartalmazza a magyarországi népesség felének munkaerőpiaci adatait. Eredményeink alapján azok, akik olyan céghez nyernek felvételt, ahol dolgozik volt munkatársuk, átlagosan 2,5 százalékkal nagyobb kezdőbérre számíthatnak azokhoz viszonyítva, akiknek nincs hasonló ismerősük. Ez azonban közvetett hatás, amely valójában a jobb látens képességűek magasabb bérszintű cégekbe szelektálódásán keresztül érvényesül. A bérelőny körülbelül három évig őrződik meg, utána eltűnik; eddig mutatható ki a munkaviszony stabilitására gyakorolt pozitív hatás is. A volt munkatársak kezdőbérre gyakorolt hatása erősebb, ha az ajánló és a jelentkező foglalkozási kategóriája egymáshoz közeli, és az ajánló magasabb pozícióban van.*&#13;\nJournal of Economic Literature (JEL) kód: J24, J31, M51, Z13.

This paper exploits longitudinal employer-employee matched data from the U.S. Census Bureau to investigate the contribution of worker and firm reallocation to changes in earnings inequality within and across industries between 1992 and 2003. We find that factors that cannot be measured using standard cross-sectional data, including the entry and exit of firms and the sorting of workers across firms, are important sources of changes in earnings distributions over time. Our results also suggest that the dynamics driving changes in earnings inequality are heterogeneous across industries.

A growing number of applications involve settings where, in order to infer heterogeneous effects, a researcher compares various units. Examples of research designs include children moving between different neighborhoods, workers moving between firms, patients migrating from one city to another, and banks offering loans to different firms. We present a unified framework for these settings, based on a linear model with normal random coefficients and normal errors. Using the model, we discuss how to recover the mean and dispersion of effects, other features of their distribution, and how to construct predictors of the effects. We provide moment conditions on the model’s parameters, and outline various estimation strategies. One of the main objectives of the paper is to clarify some of the underlying assumptions by highlighting their economic content, and to discuss and inform some of the key practical choices.

This paper investigates the role of firm characteristics in driving wage inequality and firm wage premia in the South African labour market. The Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (AKM) and Kline, Saggio, and Sølvsten (KSS) regression-based decomposition methods are applied to matched employer–employee administrative tax data for the period 2011–19. Additionally, the Theil index is used as a comparative tool for estimating wage inequality, given that the variance of logarithms applied in the regression-based decomposition methods has been established as an imprecise measure of inequality. The results show significantly high dispersion in wages, as estimated by both the AKM and the KSS methods as well as the Theil index, reaffirming the extent of high inequality in the country. Worker and firm characteristics account for 35 per cent and 18 per cent of wage dispersion, respectively, with a positive worker–firm covariance accounting for 11 per cent. Firm size, industry, profits, geographical location, and whether firms are locally or foreign-owned are found to be important in driving firm wage premia.

J’étudie les modèles de détermination de l’équilibre des salaires et de la mobilité avec frictions sur le marché du travail. La recherche d’un emploi est aléatoire. La concurrence entre les entreprises se fait en termes de promesses de valeur faites aux travailleurs. La nature exacte de cette concurrence dicte la répartition des promesses de valeur dans l’économie. La mobilité des travailleurs et l’allocation des emplois sont souvent comprises directement à partir de cette partie du modèle. L’étude détaille comment les restrictions sur les contrats de travail traduisent les valeurs des contrats en salaires .

We study compensation packages in family and non-family firms. Using French matched employer-employee data, we first show that family firms pay on average lower wages. We find that part of this wage gap is due to low wage workers sorting into family firms and high wage workers sorting into non-family firms. However, we also find evidence that company wage policies differ according to ownership status, so that the same worker is paid differently under family and non-family firm ownership. We also find evidence that family firms are characterised by lower job insecurity, as measured by dismissal rates and by the subjective risk of dismissal perceived by workers. In addition, family firms appear to rely less on dismissals – and more on hiring reductions – than non-family firms when they downsize. We show that compensating wage differentials account for a substantial part of the inverse relationship between the family/non-family gaps in wages and job security.

We examine the relationship between research and development (R&D) intensity and wages, using a unique matched employer-employee dataset. The dataset has the advantage that it links firm-level investment in R&D to individual employee wages and allows us to control for both employee and employer characteristics. Our main finding is that a one standard deviation increase in R&D intensity is associated with an increase in the hourly wage rate between 3.4 per cent and 6.9 per cent for the full sample, depending on the exact specification. We find that the wage elasticity with respect to R&D intensity is higher in larger firms as well as for better educated workers and workers with technical certification/skills. We also find, consistent with the rent-sharing hypothesis, that the wage elasticity with respect to R&D intensity is higher for workers who belong to the Communist Party or trade union.

This study aims to contribute to the literature of firms and occupations as prominent drivers of wage-inequality in multiple ways. First, we synthesize novel modelling approaches of recent studies in the field and use administrative linked employer-employee panel data from an Eastern European country, Hungary, to assess the contribution of individual, firm and job heterogeneity - and their interactions - to overall wage inequality. Consistent with earlier findings from Western Europe, Scandinavia, the US and Brazil, we show that firm heterogeneity provides around 22%, individual heterogeneity 50%, and occupational heterogeneity 8% of overall wage dispersion, with wage sorting between firms and individuals in itself explaining around 9%. Notably, around half of this contribution is accountable to observable sub-components of individual and firm wage effects. Also, the same magnitude of assortativity can be found between individuals and occupations. Utilizing unique features of our data, we compare mathematics and literature test score records of 10th grade students to their future labor market outcomes, finding a positive correlation between test scores and future firm value added, a direct evidence for assortative matching in productivity. Finally we assess sorting along observable characteristics, such as gender, education, occupation or age of workers, and the ownership of employers.

Workers often remain with their employer even when outside firms offer higher pay.This may reflect information frictions or preferences.We use a large-scale survey of full-time German workers, linked to Social Security records, to elicit pay expectations and preferences over specific outside firms.Workers believe outside pay varies across firms and direct their search toward higher-paying employers.Expected pay premia are highly correlated with administrative pay measures observed and with workers' amenity valuations.Yet most workers would not switch firms -even for substantial raises at named destination firms.Implied switching costs range from 7 to 18% of annual pay.Attachment varies across firms and is not explained by amenities or switching costs, suggesting residual firm-specific factors shape mobility.

This paper links an extension to the Melitz (2003) model that allows for a rm’s export status to be continuous to the Helpman et al. (2010) framework of heterogeneous rms in a global economy. A change in a rm’s share of exports triggered by a decrease in trading costs can then be accounted for changes in its revenue, its average wage as well as its measure of workers hired. The predictions of the model are ultimately borne out by the LIAB 1 , a German linked employer-employee data set.

There is an increasing consensus that firm-specific premia are an important determinant of wages, but there is little evidence regarding their roles in the returns to education. This paper examines the extent to which completing an associate degree increases earnings through access to higher-paying firms. Using administrative data on college enrollment and labor market outcomes from Ohio, I estimate that completing an associate degree leads to employment at firms of higher firm-specific premia by approximately 6 %, suggesting that more than one-quarter of the returns to associate degrees is attributable to moving to higher-paying firms.

This paper uses a linked employer-employee dataset from the Ghanaian manufacturing sector to analyze earnings dispersion in Ghana from 1992 to 2003, a period post extensive economic reforms. I find that variance of earnings increased from 1992 to 1998 and decreased thereafter, resembling an inverted u-shaped relationship. I use analysis of variance and variance decomposition approaches to understand the underlying factors that led to such a pattern in earnings inequality. I find that between-firm factors explain this pattern more than within-firm factors. I also find that the mean earnings gap between workers above and below the 90th percentile of income distribution can explain the majority of the initial surge in inequality (61 %) but only explains a very small fraction of the eventual decline (9 %). I run OLS regressions similar to Mincerian equations and decompose the variance components to find that the decline in earnings inequality is consistent with decline in variance of firm-level earnings whereas variance of predicted wage from worker characteristics have increased. I also find suggestive evidence of changing patterns of worker-firm sorting which contributes to the decline in inequality. These patterns however only hold up for private domestic firms and not for foreign-owned firms. JEL Codes: J31, O15

Abstract Is a change in ownership an opportunity for the new owners to make systematic changes to the workforce of the acquired plant? Using matched employer–employee data, we document changes to the workforce along observable and unobservable dimensions of worker quality around the time of ownership change. We observe above‐average separations of workers around domestic acquisitions. This is associated with a decline in unobserved worker quality in the plant. Foreign acquisitions are not associated with above‐average worker turnover; instead, new foreign owners share rents with the high‐skilled workers who are already in the plant before the acquisition.

Denne artikkelen analyserer lønnsforskjeller mellom kvinner og menn i privat sektor i Norge med et spesielt fokus på forskjeller mellom bedrifter av ulik størrelse. Våre analyser viser at lønnsforskjellene mellom kvinner og menn i virksomheter i privat sektor har falt fra 13,5 prosent i 2015 til 11 prosent i 2017, og at den nedadgående trenden som er vist i tidligere undersøkelser har vedvart. Med utgangspunkt i tidligere forskning er det grunn til å tro at lønnsforskjellene mellom kvinner og menn er størst i store bedrifter. I denne artikkelen finner vi at kjønnsforskjellen i lønn er større i de minste bedriftene enn den er i de mellomstore, og den er aller størst i de største bedriftene. Når vi studerer lønnsforskjeller mellom kvinner og menn innad i bedrifter, er timelønnsforskjellen på 9 prosent, og forskjellene er størst i de store bedriftene. Våre funn antyder at det vil være viktig å rette søkelyset mot de prosessene som er ulikhetsskapende innad i både de store og de små bedriftene i arbeidet med å redusere kjønnsforskjeller i lønn framover.

The gender gap in firm wage premiums is well documented, but evidence on its evolution over time and its contribution to declining gender wage gaps remains mixed. Using comprehensive employer-employee data from France, we find that 20% of the reduction in the gender hourly wage gap between 2002 and 2019 can be attributed to a decline in the between-firm component of the gender gap in firm wage premiums. However, our analysis shows that this reduction is not driven by improvements in women’s relative position in the firm wage premium ladder. We find no evidence that, conditional on workers’ skills, women have become more likely to move into higher-paying firms or industries, or that newer cohorts of women are better represented in these segments. Instead, the narrowing is primarily driven by broader changes in the distribution of firm wage premiums, specifically through a compression of industry-specific premium differentials. These findings highlight how structural changes in the economy can affect gender wage gaps even in the absence of changes in women’s relative labor market position.

High-tenure workers losing their job experience a large and prolonged fall in wages and earnings. The aim of this paper is to understand and quantify the forces behind this empirical regularity. We propose a structural model of the labor market with (i) on-the-job search, (ii) general human capital, and (iii) firmspecific human capital. Jobs are destroyed at an endogenous rate due to idiosyncratic productivity shocks and the skills of workers depreciate during periods of non-employment. The model is estimated on German Social Security data. By jointly matching moments related to workers' mobility and wages, the model can replicate the size and persistence of the losses in earnings and wages observed in the data. We find that the loss of a job with a more productive employer is the primary driver of the cumulative wage losses following displacement (about 50 percent), followed by the loss of firm-specific human capital (about 30 percent).

We use matched employer-employee data from Sweden to study the role of the firm in affecting the stochastic properties of wages. Our model accounts for endogenous participation and mobility decisions. We find that firm-specific permanent productivity shocks transmit to individual wages, but the effect is mostly concentrated among the high-skilled workers; firm-specific temporary shocks mostly affect the low-skilled. The updates to worker-firm specific match effects over the life of a firm-worker relationship are small. Substantial growth in earnings variance over the life cycle for high-skilled workers is driven by firms accounting for 44% of cross-sectional variance by age 55.

We find that women sorting into lower paying firms explains nearly half of the gender pay gap in South Africa. Using matched employer-employee panel data covering the universe of formal workers, we show sorting varies considerably over the life cycle: the firm-pay gender gap is negligible for the youngest workers, grows steeply for 25–35 year olds (i.e. typical child-rearing years), and narrows for older workers. The increase is driven by those continuously employed — while women are almost as likely as men to switch firms, men are more likely to switch to better-paying firms, consistent with discrimination or non-pay amenities. Churn also contributes to the gap (though is relatively constant), since women enter formal employment at worse-paying firms than men. The relative importance of the continuously employed versus entrants depends on the size of the formal sector, thus linking the life cycle patterns underlying gender gaps with economic development.

Summary In this paper we explore the scope of international profit sharing of firms engaged in international trade and FDI activities. We extend the approach proposed in the literature by allowing not only for differences between domestic and foreign owned firms, but also between firms with outward FDI, importers and exporters. We argue that firms engaged in international trade enhance their performance through knowledge spillovers and technology upgrading similarly to what happens for companies which are part of multinational groups, and that this superior performance can translate into substantial wage premia to workers through profitability. Using a unique dataset for Slovenian firms for the period 1994-2002, we confirm the existence of positive profit sharing for foreign firms, firms that engage in outward FDI and two-way traders, but not for firms which only import or export.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide empirical evidence of international rent sharing in multinational enterprises. It looks at changes in rent sharing before and after the acquisition of a company by a foreign entity, and assesses the role of target and acquirer profitability in the wage setting process for the target firm. It therefore contributes to the evaluation of the impact of a form of globalization (inward foreign direct investment (FDI)) onto wages. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use a unique firm level longitudinal dataset of M &amp; As in Belgium between 1998 and 2010. The authors construct a micro-level dataset containing takeover and accounting information for target and acquiring firms. The empirical set up permits to net the estimates from selection effects in the choice of target firm, using propensity score matching and a difference-in-difference approach. Findings – The authors find evidence that the deal does not significantly affect the degree of domestic rent sharing, but it enables international rent sharing. The authors qualify the results in terms of the acquirer’s location, industry link with the target and controlling stake. Further robustness specifications include different profits and controls, and a comparison with a sample of domestic acquisitions. Research limitations/implications – The sample of matches for acquired firms is constructed using propensity scores, which may not perfectly capture the differences between targeted and non-targeted companies. Although estimates should be net of selection effects, other sources of endogeneity may still make the estimates inconsistent. Practical implications – Updating the discussion on the labor market consequences of globalization, and on foreign takeovers in particular. Social implications – The discussion on international takeover should take into account not only the extensive margin (i.e. labor adjustments) but also salaries. The authors argue that through a precise channel (rent sharing) international takeovers of domestic companies may benefit the domestic labor force. Originality/value – The dataset was constructed for the purposes of this analysis; rent sharing is tested in a takeover scenario for the first time, thus avoiding selection biases.

This paper studies how workers’wages respond to TFP-driven innovations in …rms’labor productivity. Using unique data with highly reliable …rm level output prices and quantities in the manufacturing sector in Sweden, we are able to derive measures of physical (as opposed to revenue) TFP, which is fundamental for the results. In contrast to predictions from a competitive labor market model our results suggest that wages of both incumbents and new hires depend on …rm’s productivity. We separate the productivity innovations into a sectoral and a pure idiosyncratic component and …nd that the response to sectoral shocks is larger than the response to pure idiosyncratic (…rm-level) shocks. These results are all robust to a number of empirical speci…cations, most notably to models which account for selection on both the demand and

This paper examines how employee earnings respond to a one-time cash flow shock in the form of a government R&D grant. In a regression discontinuity design, we find that the grant immediately increases average annual employee-level earnings by 2.9%. This benefit accrues only to incumbent employees and rises with job tenure. The grant also affects firm growth, but the initial wage patterns do not appear to reflect growth or productivity. Instead, the evidence supports implicit equity financing within the firm, where employees initially accept lower wages from financially constrained firms and earn more when the firm has ability to pay.

Objective: We assess how the distribution of parents across firms contributes to parenthood wage gaps in a low-wage U.S. labor market and examine the role of understudied compensating differentials relevant to precarious work. Background: In the U.S., parenthood drives a wedge in wages, as mothers often earn less than women without children, whereas fathers typically earn more than men without children. Firms bear influence over setting wages and sorting workers, yet firms are largely omitted from research on parental wage gaps in the U.S. Method: We draw on novel employer-employee matched data on 74,086 hourly service-sector workers to decompose parental wage gaps into their within- and between-firm components. We leverage uniquely rich data on compensating differentials to test if they sort parents across firms. Results: We found that mothers are overrepresented in lower-wage firms, accounting for 68% of mothers' wage gap. In contrast, fathers' wage gap accrued within firms. We found limited evidence that compensating differentials, even schedule quality, produce parental wage gaps. Conclusion: We show for the first time that in a major U.S. industry, mothers are segregated in low-paying firms compared to women without children, while fathers are paid more than men without children in the same firms. Our findings largely do not tell a story of parents voluntarily choosing between wages and job quality, instead calling for more research on firm practices.

Abstract This paper analyses the impact of robots on workers' wages in the manufacturing sector, with a particular focus on relative wages for workers with different levels of education and in different occupations. Using high‐quality matched employer–employee register data with firm‐level information on the introduction of industrial robots, we identify the effects of robotization on relative wages within firms. Skilled blue‐collar workers with a vocational degree experience a decline in wages when firms introduce robots, while there are only small effects for the other groups of workers. These results suggest that robots are substitutes for tasks undertaken by skilled blue‐collar workers in manufacturing, and furthermore that the adoption of robots contributes to a polarization of the labour market and a hollowing out of the wage distribution, rather than to skill‐biased technical change.

This study investigates whether exporters, multinational enterprises (MNEs), and foreign-owned firms pay higher wages in Japan, using linked employer–employee data. It shows that wages of foreign-owned and domestically-owned MNEs are the highest and that wages of non-multinational exporters are higher than those of non-multinational non-exporters. The ordering of wages, with MNEs having the highest wages and exporters having higher wages than purely domestic firms, is consistent with the productivity ordering of the standard firm heterogeneity model. Even after controlling for observable plant and worker characteristics, this ordering of wages remains the same. It further finds that the residual wage premiums for foreign firms are much higher than those for non-multinational exporters and domestically-owned MNEs. The results from quantile regressions reveal that the residual wage premium is larger in the higher quantiles of the wage distribution for foreign firms, whereas I do not find a similar tendency for domestically-owned firms. Finally, this study finds that female workers receive much larger wage premiums in foreign firms than male workers.

This paper investigates how firms prepare their workforce to export. We employ a novel identification strategy to isolate how a firm’s hiring decision at home responds to export opportunities that arise from exogenous changes to product demand abroad. Combining Brazilian exporter and linked employer–employee data, we show that firms act on better chances to export by hiring workers with prior experience at exporting firms. We find that firms concentrate this preparatory hiring of experts in skilled blue-collar occupations and that firms separate from the previously hired experts when the predicted export-market participation fails to materialize. The evidence is consistent with the tenet that a few exporting experts in select occupations shape a firm’s competitive advantage.

This paper examines the manufacturing export market in Egypt after the Arab Spring using a novel firm-level census dataset from 2013. Export is very rare in Egypt. The conventional export premia are very high, except for total factor productivity. Exporters have stark effects on labour market outcomes, including wages, employment, demand for skilled and female workers, wage inequality, and job security. These findings have two important implications: (1) Manufacturing exports might be monopolized by large firms, and (2) promoting exports could improve labour market outcomes, especially for skilled and female workers.

This research uses restricted microdata from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) Program, which was partially supported by the following National Science Foundation Grants SES-9978093, SES-0339191 and ITR-0427889; National Institute on Aging Grant AG018854; and grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. All results have been reviewed to ensure that no confidential data are disclosed. All results have been approved by the Disclosure Review Board. Any opinions and conclusions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the U.S. Census Bureau. This research was performed at the Georgetown Federal Statistical Research Data Center under FSRDC Project Number 1812. All errors are our own. We acknowledge the generous financial support from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. We would like to thank George Akerlof, Joe Altonji, Heather Boushey, David Card, Raj Chetty, Larry Kahn, Kory Kroft, Jesse Rothstein, Emmanuel Saez, and Ann Stevens for comments on this paper, and especially Matt Notowidigdo for his thoughtful suggestions and Henry Hyatt for advise on the use of the algorithm to measure AKM and use of LEHD data. Adriana Kugler is the corresponding author. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of their employers nor of the National Bureau of Economic Research. ABSTRACT Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits have a moral hazard effect and a liquidity effect, with both generating increases in unemployment spells but the latter increasing wages due to the ability to find better matches or better jobs. Previous papers, however, find mixed evidence on the impact of UI on wages. In this paper, we re-examine the effect of UI on wages in the U.S. and present novel evidence using LEHD data to examine the channels through which UI increases earnings, including: (1) the quality of the match, (2) positive sorting of employers and employees, and (3) the quality of the employer. We find that the increased UI generosity in the U.S. increased wages by both increasing the quality of the match as well as the quality of the job obtained after the unemployment spell, though there is less evidence of improved sorting. Consistent with improvements in match and employer quality, we also find that the likelihood of remaining on the job increases with UI generosity. Consistent with a liquidity effect on search, we also find that the effects on the quality of the match are larger for those who are more likely to be liquidity constrained, including women, minorities, and the less-educated.

Using an unusually rich matched employer-employee-job title data set for Portugal, this paper evaluates the sources of wage losses of workers displaced due to firm closure based on the comparison of workers' wages differentials before and after displacement. Potential wage losses of displaced workers can be related to firm, job title, and match heterogeneity in the pre- and post-displacement jobs. In this vein, we estimate a three-way high-dimensional fixed effects regression model that enables us to decompose the sources of the wage losses into the contribution of firm, job title, and match fixed effects. The worker-firm match plays a very sizable role. We found that the allocation of workers into poorer matches accounts for 38 percent of the total average wage loss. Sorting among firms accounts for 36 percent. Job downgrading also plays a significant role in explaining the wage loss of displaced workers, accounting for the remaining 26 percent.

Empirical labor economists have resorted to estimating the responsiveness of workers' wages on firms' ability to pay to assess the extent to which employers share rents with their employees. This paper compares this labor economics approach with two other approaches that rely on standard micro production data only: the productivity approach for which estimates of the output elasticities of labor and materials and data on the respective revenue shares are needed and the accounting approach which boils down to directly computing the extent of rent sharing from firm accounting information. Using matched employer-employee data on 60,294 employees working in 9,849 firms over the period 1984-2001 in France, we quantify industry differences in rent-sharing parameters derived from the three approaches. We find a median absolute extent of rent sharing of about 0.30 using either the productivity or the accounting approach. Only exploiting firm-level information brings this median rent-sharing parameter down to 0.16 using the labor economics approach. Controlling for unobserved worker ability further reduces the median absolute extent of rent sharing to 0.08. Our analysis makes clear that the three different approaches face important trade-offs. Hence, empirical economists interested in establishing that profits are shared should select the appropriate approach based on the particular research question and on the data at hand.

Firms vary in their production processes, leading to different occupational skill requirements, and they employ workers with varying skill levels. The sorting of workers with heterogeneous skills into firms differing in productivity, size and age matters for both economic efficiency and distributional outcomes. This paper applies a unified measurement approach to comprehensive administrative micro data from Portugal to establish five facts about the relationship between workforce skills, firm productivity and dynamics, and wage differentials: 1) firms at the productivity frontier not only rely more on high-skill occupations, they also tend to hire the most skilled workers within each occupation; 2) such differences in workforce composition statistically explain close to a fifth of firm-level productivity dispersion; 3) young firms with a high-quality workforce are more likely to experience rapid employment growth; 4) more than half of the large-firm wage premium can be attributed to large firms employing more skilled workers; 5) working alongside highly skilled colleagues raises wages, and the clustering of talented workers in the same firms contributes about as much to the variance of log wages as worker-firm sorting. Together, these results highlight the significant interaction between human capital factors and firm dynamics.

We use novel surveys of firms and workers, linked to administrative employer-employee data, to study the prevalence and importance of individual bargaining in wage determination. We show that simple survey questions accurately elicit firms’ bargaining strategies. Using the elicited strategies for 772 German firms, we document that the majority of firms are willing to engage in individual wage bargaining. Labor market factors predict firms’ strategies better than firm characteristics. Survey responses from nearly 10,000 full-time workers indicate that most workers provide their salary expectations before they receive a job offer. Most outside offers are rejected, with the worker remaining at the incumbent firm. There is substantial heterogeneity in workers’ bargaining behavior, which translates into within-firm wage inequality. Firms that set pay via individual bargaining have a 3 percentage point higher gender wage gap.

We examine the effect of firm profits on wages for individual workers while focusing on the empirical complications associated with estimating the extent of rent-sharing. Controlling for worker and firm fixed-effects and using several instruments to deal with the endogeneity of profits, we report results indicating that OLS-estimates strongly underestimate the effects of profits on wages. Moreover, the effect of profits on wages are estimated separately for firms with increasing and decreasing profits within a given time period. We find a positive and stable effect only in firms with increasing profits. This is in line with the idea that falling profits do not lead to wage cuts while increasing profits imply higher wages.

The authors investigate the role of firm pay premiums in explaining the large, persistent earnings losses of displaced workers. They first estimate that long-run earnings for displaced workers from 2002 to 2008 in Ohio are depressed by 22%. Drawing upon empirical approaches from the displaced worker and firm heterogeneity literature, the authors then estimate that one-quarter of this earnings loss can be explained by the forfeiture of a favorable employer-specific pay premium. Such firm rents are more salient for those laid off from manufacturing firms, explaining half of their lost earnings. Nevertheless, this study adds to early evidence that firm rents do not explain the majority of earnings losses sustained by displaced workers in the United States.

Abstract We introduce firm‐specific returns to experience and tenure into a standard two‐way fixed effects model, show that they are separately identified under the standard exogenous mobility assumption and with sufficient between firm mobility, and provide a new evidence on heterogeneity of returns to experience and tenure across firms using the administrative data from Brazil over the years 1999–2014. We document that (1) returns to tenure are not strongly related to firm wage premia, (2) returns to experience are strongly negatively correlated with firm wage premia, (3) the relationship between firm wage premium and return to experience is stronger for ‘blue collar’ firms.

Firms are central to many theories of the labor market. However, the actual degree to which firms shape the structure of wages is still not well understood. This paper investigates (i) the importance of firms in explaining wage differences across individuals and industries, and (ii) how the nature of interfirm mobility - job-to-job vs. job-unemployment-job - affects the relative importance of firms and workers in wage determination. Results indicate that (i) firms are much more important in explaining the variance of average wages across industries rather than across individuals, and (ii) using job-to-job transitions to identify the firm's contribution to the wage rate reduces the importance of firm wage policies in explaining wage differences by as much as 50%.

This paper develops a new approach to measuring non-wage amenities and compensating differentials in the labor market.Using a survey of 20,000 job movers in Denmark, we elicit workers' reservation wage to return to their previous jobs.Our sample contains a large, connected network of firms, enabling us to estimate firm-wide premia and match effects in amenity values.Overall, higher-paying firms provide slightly worse non-pay amenities.Although they provide better perks and flexibility, they also come with higher layoff risk, faster work pace, and greater stress.On average, moves to jobs offering 10% higher pay involve a 5% reduction in the value of amenities, with 0.7% attributable to firm-wide tradeoffs and the remainder attributable to match effects in pay and preferences.Using a rich search model, we quantify the role of amenities in labor market inequality while accounting for preference heterogeneity and endogenous mobility.Worse amenities at high-paying firms offset more than half of their wage advantage, and the within-worker variance in pay across firms overstates the variance in utility by 50%.

Why are wages in cities like New York or Paris higher than in others?This paper uses firm mobility to separate the role of "location effects" (e.g., local geography, infrastructure, and agglomeration) from the spatial sorting of workers and firms.Using French administrative records and U.S. commercial data, we first document that firm mobility is widespread: 4% of establishments relocate annually.Establishments retain their main activity and structure as they move, but adjust their workforce and wages.Combining firm and worker mobility, we then decompose wage disparities across French commuting zones.We find that spatial wage differences are largely driven by the sorting and co-location of workers and firms: location effects account for only 2-5% of disparities, while differences in the composition of workers and establishments account for around 30% and 15%, respectively.The remaining half is accounted for by the co-location of high-wage workers and firms, especially in cities with high location effects.Revisiting the elasticity of local wages to population density, we find a significant coefficient of 0.007 -two to three times lower than estimates not controlling for firm composition.

Brand capital is widely recognized for its role in enhancing firm value and profitability, but its impact on firms’ incentives to improve workers’ welfare remains unclear. We observe considerable variation in advertising intensity within and across sectors, highlighting its influence on firm-labor dynamics. This study investigates how the accumulation of brand capital affects a firm’s willingness to share rents with workers. Our findings suggest that, on average, higher brand capital enhances this willingness, particularly among service-oriented firms, older firms, firms based in large cities, and during economic downturns. However, workers benefit from more aggressive advertising investment only when a firm’s distributional policy generates a positive elasticity of willingness to share. Irrespective of distributional policy, brand capital amplifies between-firm wage inequality. • Goods firms cluster at low ad intensity; services firms show more diverse behavior. • Rent-sharing motive explains advertising variation across and within sectors. • WTSE reflects rent-sharing attitudes; its sign shows distributional strategy. • WTSE is stronger in services, older firms, big cities, and recessions as brands grow. • Brand capital accumulation is a new channel driving between-firm wage inequality.

When labour market competition is imperfect, positive industry (and firm) productivity shocks can be passed through to workers in the form of higher wages. We document how the UK auto industry, following a period of decline, experienced a four-decade-long productivity boom. There was a thirteen-fold increase in real output per worker between 1980 and 2018, compared to a four-fold increase in manufacturing. Greater foreign ownership, tougher competition and improved industrial relations all likely played a role. The greater use of intermediate inputs (outsourcing) and growing capital intensity account for most of this growth, but we estimate that TFP still grew three times as fast in the auto industry than the rest of manufacturing. Examining whether this productivity increase has been shared with employees, we find that auto workers experienced far stronger hourly wage growth than workers in the rest of manufacturing. After controlling for individual fixed effects, the auto wage premium relative to the rest of manufacturing doubled from 8% in the 1980s to 17% in the 2010s. Interpreted through the lens of a rent sharing model, we estimate that most of the wage increase (63% in the baseline case) can be accounted for by the auto productivity boom. In contrast, the bargaining power of UK auto workers seems to have fallen. If worker power had held up at the 1980s level, the wage premium would have been about 38% higher in the 2010s.

Abstract Aggregate wages display little cyclicality compared to what a standard model would predict. Wage rigidities are an obvious candidate, but the existing literature has emphasized the need to take into account the growing importance of worker composition effects, especially during downturns. This paper seeks to understand the role of firm heterogeneity for aggregate wage dynamics with reference to the Italian case. Using a newly available dataset based on social security records covering the universe of Italian employers between 1990 and 2015, we document that firm composition effects increasingly matter in explaining aggregate wage growth and largely reflect shifts of labor from low-paying to high-paying firms, especially in the most recent years. We find that changes in reallocation of workers across firms accounted for approximately one-fourth of aggregate wage growth during the crisis.

We find that US workers outside manufacturing exhibit relative earnings increases after US trade liberalization with China. These relative gains cumulate over time as the beneficial effect of a worker’s upstream exposure—increased competition from China in input markets—more than offsets the detrimental impact of her own and downstream (customer) exposures. These relative gains are smaller for non-manufacturing workers with less ex ante firm tenure and lower initial earnings, and are absent among manufacturing workers due to a lack of upstream gains and stronger downstream losses.

I study a labor market in which identical workers search on- and off-the-job and heterogeneous firms employ using either posted wages or wage contracts contingent on outside options. Firm level costs for contingent contracts generate a separating equilibrium in which less productive firms post wages. The model with heterogeneous contracts can achieve wage dispersion, labor share, employment transitions, and flow value of unemployment that are simultaneously consistent with empirical observations even when most firms post wages. Using German employee-level administrative data, I estimate roughly 70 percent of firms post wages and employ nearly 50 percent of workers under such contracts.

ABSTRACT We study the relationship between offshoring and labor market imperfections at the firm level in Belgium and the Netherlands. In both countries, wage‐markup pricing stemming from workers' monopoly power is more prevalent than wage‐markdown pricing originating from firms' monopsony power. Offshoring is associated with a higher prevalence and intensity of wage markdowns, driven by an increase in productivity that is only imperfectly passed through into an increase in wages. The lower firm‐level productivity‐wage pass‐through in Belgium, attributed to its more centralized bargaining structure, makes wage markdowns more responsive to offshoring.

Abstract We explore the wage effects of offshoring‐induced employment shocks in US commuting zones (CZs) and industries. Using data on petitions for the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA), we measure such shocks by computing the share of TAA‐certified offshoring‐induced layoffs out of total employment. We further identify material‐offshoring shocks and service‐offshoring shocks and connect the TAA data to individual‐level worker data from the American Community Survey. Empirical results show statistically significant and negative wage effects of the CZ‐level offshoring shocks, especially for service offshoring. On the contrary, we find positive wage effects of industry‐level offshoring shocks in industries exposed to both types of offshoring. Furthermore, we show that offshoring is associated with the widening gender wage gap in local labor markets and that workers in production and highly‐offshorable occupations are more vulnerable to the CZ‐level offshoring shocks.

We study the welfare effects of international trade on workers with a new dynamic general equilibrium discrete choice model of labor mobility, where the workers’ choice set of jobs is endogenous. Introducing an endogenous number of job options is crucial for matching labor flows in data and quantifying the welfare effects of trade. We exploit differential exposure of sectors and regions to destination-specific demand shocks to estimate the impacts of exports on wages, employment, and labor mobility, using matched employer–employee panel data for Brazil. The same empirical strategy is also applied to estimate structural parameters and the different components of changes in model-implied worker welfare. Counterfactual simulations confirm that the welfare effects of trade are significantly magnified by the introduction of an endogenous number of job options.

We study the effect of the bilateral trade integration with China on wage inequality in Brazil. Previous studies have documented the contribution of trade opening to the decline in inequality since the 1990s, driven primarily by cross-firm pay differences. We find a sharper reduction in wage inequality over the 2000s, parallel to China's accession to the WTO. Our analysis of the China shock suggests that some firms are harmed by import competition, especially those in the High-Tech Manufacturing sector, while others profit from increased exports and cheaper inputs. We rationalize these patterns by extending the theoretical framework of Helpman et al. (2017) to include sector heterogeneity in trade exposure and firm-level selection into imports. Our model indicates that the rise of China led to a reduction in cross-firm wage inequality in Brazil by about 5%.

Abstract In this paper, we first build a simple model with firm heterogeneity that features input and output tariffs in firms’ production decisions. We show that tariff reduction, due to trade liberalisation, has different effects on firms’ profit. Input tariff reduction generates a cost‐saving effect which benefits firms whilst output tariff reduction results in a competition effect which may hurt domestic firms. Given the fair wage argument, trade liberalisation may affect wages across firms due to the joint effects on firm profit. Using detailed Chinese manufacturing firm data from 1998 to 2007, we conduct empirical tests to investigate how trade liberalisation affects Chinese firm wages. In particular, we measure the joint effects of input and output tariff reduction by the applying the new measurement on the effective rate of protection. Furthermore, we also control for the effect of the iterated use of inputs with an index of a firm’s position on value chain. We found that from 1998 to 2007, Chinese manufacturing firms paid higher wages due to higher tariff protection when firms’ status on value chain was controlled. The result remains robust when more control variables are included and the endogeneity problem is considered.

This paper estimates the incidence of corporate taxes on wages using a 20-year panel of German municipalities. Administrative linked employer-employee data allows estimating heterogeneous worker and firm effects. We set up a general theoretical framework showing that corporate taxes can have a negative effect on wages in various labor market models. Using an event study design, we test the predictions of the theory. Our results indicate that workers bear about 40% of the total tax burden. Empirically, we confirm the importance of both labor market institutions and profit shifting possibilities for the incidence of corporate taxes on wages.

Using novel matched employer-employee register data with firm-level information on the introduction of industrial robots, this paper analysis the impact of robots on the wages of workers in the manufacturing sector. The results show that industrial robots increase wages for high-skilled workers relative to low-skilled workers, hence robots increases the skill-premium within firms. Furthermore, we find that employees in managerial positions benefit more from robotisation than those in STEM or professional occupations. Overall, our results suggest that the introduction of industrial robots has a positive effect on the average wages of manufacturing workers in Norway.

We determine workforce composition and wages in firms in the presence of productivity spill-overs between co-workers. In equilibrium, workers' wages depend on the production structure of firms, own group size, and aggregate workforce composition in the firm. We estimate the wage effects of workforce diversity and own group size by birthplace and the implied production structure in Austrian firms using a comprehensive matched employer-employee data set. In our data, we identify a positive effect of workforce diversity and a negative effect of own group size on wages, which suggest that workers of different birthplaces are complements in production on average.

Using matched employer-employee-contract data for Portugal – a country with near-universal union coverage – we find evidence of a sizable effect of union affiliation on wages. Gelbach's (2016) decomposition procedure is next deployed to ascertain the contributions of worker, firm, match, and job-title heterogeneity to the union wage gap. Of these the most important is the firm fixed effect, followed at some distance by union workers gaining from elevated job titles and/or more generous promotion policies. For its part, unobserved worker quality plays only a very weak role, while there is even less suggestion that improved match quality bolsters the union premium.

There is a long literature that has studied the link between firm productivity and the wage they pay their workers. The typical finding is that more productive firms pay higher wages, and are larger in size. A recent stream of papers including Lopes de Melo (13), Eeckhout and Kircher (10) and Lise, Meghir and Robin (12) has emphasized a different aspect of the productivity-wages relationship. These papers have stressed that in assignment models, after you condition on worker skill, wages are non-monotone in firm productivity. The explanation for this is that each worker has an ideal firm that he should be matched and the price system (wages) is what induces matching. While these papers have used this prediction of the theory to explain some empirical regularities they have not provided direct evidence of those non-monotonicities. In this paper, we estimate a conditional wage function using a matched employer-employee dataset from Brazil to shed light on this question. In particular, we are interested in how much wages vary in firm productivity conditional on worker skill, and if that function is monotone or not. The idea is to use restrictions from the theory to construct an index of worker skill, an index of firm productivity and a third index which we label compensating differentials. This last index captures systematic differences in pay across firm, and are consistent with the compensation for a job amenity. Our indexes capture both observed and unobserved characteristics of firms and workers and they can be computed for subsets of workers within establishments. Once we compute those indexes we estimate the conditional wage function using non-parametric methods. Applying this method to a Brazilian matched employer employee dataset yields a number of results. First, we find that there is strong assortative matching in the Brazilian economy, as the worker and firm indexes are highly correlated. Second, after conditioning on worker skill the share of wage dispersion due to differences in productivity is very small - less than 2% of overall wage dispersion. Third, for most levels of worker skill, the wage function is non-monotone in firm productivity. However, the peak of the wage function seems to be not increasing in worker skill, which goes against the theory. Fourth the estimated wage function only accounts for around 60% of overall wage dispersion, and it's residual is highly clustered across firms. This last observation is what motivates us to consider the extended model with compensating differentials, but the results with the augmented model are work in progress.

The extent to which employers share rents with their employees is typically assessed by estimating the responsiveness of workers’ wages on firms’ ability to pay. This paper compares rent-sharing estimates using such a wage determination regression with estimates based on a productivity regression that relies on standard firm-level input and output data. Using a large matched firm-worker panel data sample for French manufacturing, we find that the respective industry distributions of the rent-sharing estimates are correlated and slightly overlap, but are significantly different on average. Precisely, if we only rely on the firm-level information, we obtain an average rent-sharing estimate of roughly 0.30 for the productivity regression and 0.17 for the wage determination regression. When we also take advantage of the worker-level information to control for unobserved worker ability in the model of wage determination, we find as expected a lower average value of 0.10.

Assortative Matching between workers and firms provides evidence of the complementarities or substitutes in production. The presence of complementarities is important for policies that aim to achieve the optimal allocation of resources, for example unemployment insurance. We argue that using wage data alone, it is virtually impossible to identify whether Assortative Matching is positive or negative. Even though we cannot identify the sign of the sorting, we can identify the strength, i.e., the magnitude of the cross-partial, and the associated welfare loss. We show first that the wage for a given worker is non-monotonic in the type of his employer. This is due to the fact that in a sorting model, wages re ect the opportunity cost of mismatch. We show analytically that this non-monotonicity prevents standard form fixed effects to correlate with the true type of the form. We then propose an alternative procedure that measures the strength of sorting in the presence of search frictions. Knowing the strength of sorting facilitates the measurement of the output loss due to mismatch.

As in other OECD countries, women in New Zealand earn substantially less than men with similar observable characteristics. In this paper, we use a decade of annual wage and productivity data from New Zealand’s Linked Employer-Employee Database to examine different explanations for this gender wage gap. Sorting by gender at either the industry or firm level explains less than one-fifth of the overall wage gap. Gender differences in productivity within firms also explain little of the difference seen in wages. The relationships between the gender wage-productivity gap and both age and tenure are inconsistent with statistical discrimination being an important explanatory factor for the remaining differences in wages. Relating across industry and over time variation in the gender wage-productivity gap to industry-year variation in worker skills, and product market and labour market competition, we find evidence that is consistent with taste discrimination being important for explaining the overall gender wage gap. Explanations based on gender differences in bargaining power are less consistent with our findings.

In this thesis I study collective bargaining, wage inequality, firm dynamics and the ways in which they interact. In the first chapter I investigate the extent to which wages vary across different industries after controlling for detailed worker and job characteristics and how this is related to the wage setting institutions of a given country. In the second chapter I study the drivers of the growth in earnings and wage inequality in Italy between 1985 and 2018 and compare them to the USA. In the third chapter I build a large-firm search model with heterogeneous firms and endogenous firm entry in order to compare the aggregate implications of firm-level and sector-level wage setting. Chapter 1: Informal Coordination of Wage Bargaining and the Size of Sector Wage Premiums I use the Eurostat’s Structure of Earnings Survey which is a unique data set containing microdata harmonised across European countries in order to investigate the relationship between wage setting institutions and wage dispersion. First, I find that in countries where the main level for wage bargaining is the sector, the dispersion of wages across sectors after controlling for detailed worker and job characteristics is substantially smaller than in countries where wage bargaining occurs predominantly at the firm level. This is surprising given that sector-level bargaining implies equalising wages only for each worker type within industries. The result points towards strong informal coordination of wages across sectors achieved via pattern bargaining. Second, I find that the overall wage dispersion is larger in the countries with firm-level wage setting. As a result, the relative share of the overall wage inequality that can be attributed to the sector that a worker is employed in is not generally larger in the countries with firm-level wage setting. Third, I find that in countries with sector-level wage setting observable worker characteristics explain a larger fraction of the overall wage variance. This is likely because wages are not individually bargained, but are based on a collectively bargained formula that includes characteristics such as worker occupation, education, years of experience and tenure. Chapter 2: It’s the Sectors, not the Firms: Accounting for Earnings and Wage Inequality Trends in Italy 1985-2018 Using administrative data for the entire universe of private-sector employment in Italy for the period 1985-2018 we investigate the drivers of the growth in earnings and wage inequality and compare them with other countries, in particular the USA. First, we find that the majority of the increase in earnings inequality in Italy (62%) is due to an increase in the variance of average earnings between firms and only about 38% is due to increased variance within firms. This is very similar to the results found for the US (Song et al. (2019)). Second, we decompose the between-firm variance into the between-sector variance and the between-firms-within-sector variance. Whereas in the US, the contribution of the between-sector variance to the overall growth in earnings dispersion is minimal and the majority of the growth of inequality is a between-firm-within-sector phenomenon, in Italy the rising between-sector variance explains approx. 42% of the overall increase in earnings dispersion, with the between-firm-within-sector component playing only a small role. The most likely explanation for the different patterns of rising earnings inequality between Italy and the USA seems to be differences in wage-setting institutions. Wage bargaining in the US is at the firm level whereas in Italy over 90% of workers are covered by sector-level collective agreements that specify wage floors for each occupation. This does not necessarily mean that sector wage premiums became larger in Italy. It is much more likely that the sector-level negotiators simply allowed increases in the relative demand for high skilled workers driven by technological changes to be reflected in the minimum wages for different occupations. This in combination with the fact that occupational composition of the workforce differs hugely between the narrowly defined industries, but arguably much less within them can potentially explain why the growth of earnings (and wage) dispersion between sectors accounted for such a large share of the overall growth of inequality in Italy. Finally, we find that the pattern found in the USA, the UK and Brazil, that changes in the dispersion of average earnings between firms within the same narrowly defined industries explain the majority of the changes in earnings dispersion, is not universal. Chapter 3: The Aggregate Implications of Sector-Level vs Firm-Level Wage Setting in a Frictional Labour Market I compare a setting where a firm negotiates wages with each worker separately with a two-tier collective bargaining framework. In the latter case a sector-wide union and an employer organisation first bargain over the tariff wage that applies to all the homogeneous workers and then additional wage premiums are bargained collectively at firm-level. The model can vary the extent of centralisation of wage bargaining by adjusting the ability of workers to organise industrial actions at firm-level. The modelling framework is a search model with multi-worker firms that are heterogeneous in productivity. As a result of fixed costs of production there is a threshold firm productivity level and thus a firm-selection mechanism. Under firm-level bargaining (either individual or collective) there is wage dispersion across firms driven by rent sharing and the wage is an increasing function of the firm’s output per worker. Because of convex hiring costs firms only gradually grow towards their target size. Given that firm productivity is constant over the life of the firm and there are decreasing returns to scale, wage is declining in firm age. Firms with higher permanent productivity face higher wages along their entire growth path. My main finding is that reducing wage dispersion across firms while keeping average wage constant leads to a higher total value added. I provide two novel arguments in favour of sector-level bargaining. Firstly, centralised wage setting can reduce the young firm wage premium and thus encourage more firm entry. Secondly, it can weaken the link between firm size and wages and thus reduce the inefficiencies associated with the over-employment effect which has been identified by the existing literature.

A growing empirical literature underscores the pivotal role of ”global firms” in shaping labour market outcomes, including inequality. These are firms that participate in the international economy across multiple dimensions, including both trade and foreign direct investment (FDI). This prompts an important question: Is wage inequality among workers with similar characteristics primarily influenced by firms engaged solely in exporting, those involved solely in FDI, or by multinational enterprises (MNEs) that do both? Using linked employer–employee panel data for Germany, this paper unveils nuanced patterns in wage premia among various internationalising establishments, where I identify sorting between workers and establishments as a key driver. I interpret these patterns using a theoretical model that incorporates trade and FDI with monopolistic competition, wherein heterogeneous firms operate within frictional labour markets as they search for workers. My model gives rise to a novel channel for the MNE wage premium, stemming from their ability to transfer their human resource practices to their plant abroad.

In this paper, we exploit the properties of a two-way fixed effects wage decomposition ‘a la AKM to disentangle the influence of parental background, beyond education, between individual level components and sorting across firms with different pay policies. We match Italian employer–employee administrative data with university records from a large public institution. Our findings indicate that approximately two-thirds of the background-related wage premium operates through firm assignment, while the remaining third reflects variation in individual returns. The sorting channel becomes increasingly relevant as workers progress in their careers. Moreover, the background channel weakens worker–firm positive assortative matching and plays a compensatory role: it is stronger both on firm allocation among low-wage workers and on individual fixed effects within low-paying firms.

This paper investigates whether employers share rents equally between white-collar and blue-collar workers. Using bias-corrected methods on administrative data from Italy’s Veneto region, I reject this null hypothesis. On average, white-collar workers receive premia that are 13%–15% higher than those of their blue-collar counterparts. This average disparity conceals substantial heterogeneity: half of the top 20% of firms for white-collar workers fall within the bottom 60% of the blue-collar distribution. High-type firms are, thus, not equally beneficial for all employees. Finally, the paper shows that firm premia differentiation has a long history: since the late 1980s, employers have steadily reduced the rents shared with blue-collar workers. • Firms pay unequal wage premia to white- and blue-collar workers. • High-paying firms for white-collar workers are often low-paying for blue-collar workers. • Accounting for occupation-specific premia strengthens worker–firm sorting measures. • Rent-sharing gaps are unrelated to collective bargaining agreements. • Blue-collar premia have steadily declined since the late 1980s.

This paper examines how workforce composition, labor demand, and minimum wage jointly determine wages through their effects on worker-task assignments, firm wage premiums, and firm-worker sorting. Using an estimated model of monopsonistic local labor markets, it finds that minimum wage hikes and labor demand shocks drove the decline in Brazilian wage inequality from 1998 to 2012. While rising educational attainment compressed skill premiums within firms, it also reallocated skilled workers to high-wage firms, limiting that shock’s effect on inequality. The analysis highlights interactions among exogenous factors, showing that concurrent supply and demand changes attenuated minimum wage impacts. (JEL J22, J23, J24, J31, J38, J42, R23)

We propose an empirical Bayes estimator for two-way effects in linked data sets based on a novel prior that leverages patterns of assortative matching observed in the data. To capture limited mobility we model the bipartite graph associated with the matched data in an asymptotic framework where its Laplacian matrix has small eigenvalues that converge to zero. The prior hyperparameters that control the shrinkage are determined by minimizing an unbiased risk estimate. We show the proposed empirical Bayes estimator is asymptotically optimal in compound loss, despite the weak connectivity of the bipartite graph and the potential misspecification of the prior. We estimate teacher values-added from a linked North Carolina Education Research Data Center student-teacher data set.

Abstract Do firms in China share rents with their workers? We address this question by examining firm‐level panel data covering virtually all manufacturing firms over the period 2000–2007, representing an average of 52 million workers per year. We find evidence of rent sharing (RS), with wage–profit elasticities of between 4% and 6%. These results are based on multiple instrumental variables, including firm‐specific international trade shocks. We also present a number of complementary findings to understand better the nature of RS in the country: it involves an element of risk sharing, as wages also decrease when profits fall; RS is lower in regions with more latent competition from rural workers; higher minimum wages tend to reduce RS; and, while employer labour market power reduces wages, it increases RS. Overall, despite its importance, RS in China is smaller and more symmetric than in developed economies, which reflects the weaker bargaining power of its workers and the earlier stage of development of its labour market institutions.

I discuss the recent literature that has led to new interest in the idea of monopsonistic wage setting. Building on advances in search theory and in models of differentiated products, researchers have used a number of different strategies to identify the elasticity of firm-specific labor supply. A growing consensus is that firms have some wage-setting power, though many questions remain about the sources of that power. (JEL B21, D21, D24, D43, J22, J31, J42)

This chapter reviews the theory of monopsonistic wage setting, its empirical implications, and some puzzles the framework has struggled to explain. We begin by examining the fundamentals of monopsonistic wage determination. The core of the theory is a mapping from the distribution of worker outside options to wages. We study non-parametric shape restrictions that ensure this mapping is unique. Building on these results, we introduce a menu of tractable parametrizations of labor supply to the firm, some of which are shown to emerge naturally from equilibrium search models. Next, we review why wage markdowns do not necessarily signal inefficiency and discuss some criteria for assessing misallocation in a monopsony model with search frictions. Turning to the model's empirical implications, we examine how the magnitude of productivity-wage passthrough depends on the super-elasticity of labor supply to the firm and establish that compensating differentials for firm amenities depend on the curvature of the outside option distribution. We show that firm-specific shifts in either productivity or amenities can be used as instruments to identify labor supply elasticities and review strategies for estimating non-constant elasticities. We then consider extensions of the basic model involving third-degree wage discrimination and examine their ability to rationalize patterns of worker-firm sorting. Monopsony models traditionally assume that firms commit to posted wages. Relaxing this assumption, we develop a connection between the first-order conditions of the monopsony model and models of bargaining with incomplete information. These models explain why bilateral inefficiencies may persist in the presence of negotiation, yield predictions about the response of within-firm wage dispersion to productivity shocks, and suggest reasons why some productivity shifters may not constitute excludable instruments. Next, we endogenize productivity by allowing for efficiency wages, non-constant returns to scale, and price-cost markups. Empirical monopsony estimates often suggest that firms enjoy implausibly large profit margins. We argue that allowing for non-constant labor supply elasticities and firm adjustment costs can potentially resolve this difficulty. Finally, we review why the strong passthrough of minimum wages to product prices presents a challenging puzzle for standard monopsony models and discuss potential reconciliations to this puzzle involving firm heterogeneity, quality upgrading, and lumpy price adjustment.

Abstract In the canonical random on-the-job search model with continuous firm heterogeneity, I show that a mean-preserving spread of the firm-productivity distribution raises the returns to mobility, i.e., the inter-firm mobility of workers as measured by the number of outside contacts per employment spell. Both sorting and rent-share mechanisms play a role. In a further contribution, I distinguish frictional and structural impediments to mobility in order to establish a link between mobility and skills via the concept of versatility. Versatility enhances a person’s mobility since a mismatch between job requirements and the person’s skill set is less likely to occur. I provide some statistics in support of the discussed mechanisms. The findings are particularly intriguing in light of the concurrent rise in the productivity dispersion across firms and in the skill premium in many countries.

Inequality in Latin America fell substantially in the early 2000s. In this paper, we take advantage of administrative matched employee-employed data in Brazil, Chile and Ecuador to examine whether these inequality trends held in the formal sector, as well. We document a significant decrease in the log variance of earnings in Brazil and Ecuador in the early 2000s, whereas inequality in Chile between 2008 and 2015 remained largely flat. In this context, we find that inequality among salaried workers is largely a between-firm phenomenon across these three countries. We expand on our descriptive analysis and estimate an additive worker and firm fixed effects model to understand the driving factors behind inequality in the region. We find a significant decline in between-firm inequality in Brazil and a modest one in Chile. We last focus our attention on the commodities and manufacturing sectors, which were directly exposed to two large external shocks, the commodity-boom and the ''China Shock". We find an increase in inequality in the former sector accompanied by an reduction in inequality in the latter across the region.

This thesis analyses the role of workplace heterogeneity in determining pay differentials between workers, employing a range of reduced-form tools and using detailed matched employer-employee administrative data. The first chapter, co-authored with Alessandra Casarico, studies the contribution of differences in firm pay policy to the gender wage gap in Italy, decomposing them into a between-firm component of sorting of women in low-pay firms and a within-firm component related to differences in bargaining power between gender. Building on Card et al. (2016), we investigate the contribution of firms to the gender gap in earnings at different deciles of the earnings distribution, by age and cohort, and over time. Using a linked employer-employee dataset for Italy, covering the universe of workers in the private sector, we show that the gap in firm pay policy explains on average 30 percent of the gender pay gap in the period 1995-2015. When we decompose differences in firm pay policy into sorting and bargaining, we find that sorting of women in low pay firms dominates on average and at the bottom of the distribution, whereas bargaining prevails at the top and has increased in importance over time. We explore gendered mobility patterns towards firms with more generous pay policy as a driver of sorting and exploit exogenous variation in the gender composition of board of directors to study the impact of firm environment on gender differences in bargaining power. We find that women are less likely to move towards more generous firms, especially in the event of firm closures, and that exogenous changes in the gender balance in leadership positions reduce the gender gap in bargaining power, indicating that the latter is partly malleable to institutional changes. The second chapter, co-authored with Long Hong, studies the contribution of coworkers on future wage growth. Using linked employer-employee data for the Veneto region in Italy, we explore coworkers' effect on wage growth in two directions. First, using a novel estimation method and accounting for the endogenous sorting of workers into peer groups and firms, we estimate the impact of average peer quality on future wages. We find that a 10 percent rise in peer quality increases one's wage in the next year by 1.8 percent. The effect decreases gradually over time and becomes about 0.7 percent after five years. Second, we delve deeper into the channels that identify the peer effect and, using an event-study specification around mobility episodes, we study how the entry and leave of high-quality and low-quality workers affect wages of movers and coworkers. We find that hiring a high-quality worker is an important driver of wage growth, as well as separating from a low-quality worker. Movers experience an immediate gain when moving into high-quality peers. Knowledge spillover and peer pressure are likely important mechanisms in explaining our findings. The third chapter studies the worker-, firm- and sector-level adjustment to robots. Combining detailed matched employer-employee data for Italy over the period 1994-2018 with robot counts by industry in the manufacturing sector, we show that automation adoption expands employment opportunities and reduces labour market transitions. At the worker level, those who are either high-skilled, white-collar, or employed in more productive firms experience employment and earnings gains. Meanwhile at the firm-level, sales and value added increase, while employment outcomes are highly heterogeneous between ex-ante more and less productive firms; with the former increasing employment of all workers, irrespective of their skill level, and the latter reducing it. These changes in labour demand are further inspected at the sector-level, where an event study approach following spikes in automation adoption reveals a negative effect of automation on labour market sorting. Overall, this chapter provides evidence on the impact of automation on a country with a strong manufacturing sector and a relatively rigid labour market. When exploring heterogeneous effects across workers and firms, there is a clear distinction between "winners" and "losers"', with less skilled workers facing bigger losses from technology adoption.

Des données administratives appariées employeur-employé tirées du Fichier de données longitudinales sur la main-d’œuvre de Statistique Canada, qui s’étendent sur presque trente ans, de 1991 à 2019, nous permettent d’analyser l’évolution de l’inégalité des gains entre les entreprises du secteur commercial au Canada et à l’intérieur de ces entreprises. Un modèle économétrique tenant compte des effets fixes des travailleurs et des entreprises suggère une inégalité croissante entre les entreprises, attribuable principalement à la disparité de leurs gains moyens et à l’évolution de la composition de leur main-d’œuvre respective.

Wage mobility reduces the persistence of wage inequality. We develop a framework to quantify the contribution of employer-to-employer movers to aggregate wage mobility. Using three decades of German social security data, we find that inequality increased while aggregate wage mobility decreased. Employer-to-employer movers exhibit higher wage mobility, mainly due to changes in employer wage premia at job change. The massive structural changes following German unification temporarily led to a high number of movers, which in turn boosted aggregate wage mobility. Wage mobility is much lower at the bottom of the wage distribution, and the decline in aggregate wage mobility since the 1980s is concentrated there. The overall decline can be mostly attributed to a reduction in wage mobility per mover, which is due to a compositional shift toward lower-wage movers.

Abstract Wage mobility reduces the persistence of wage inequality. We develop a framework to quantify the contribution of employer-to-employer movers to aggregate wage mobility. Using three decades of German social security data, we find that inequality increased while aggregate wage mobility decreased. Employer-to-employer movers exhibit higher wage mobility, mainly due to changes in employer wage premia at job change. The massive structural changes following German unification temporarily led to a high number of movers, which in turn boosted aggregate wage mobility. Wage mobility is much lower at the bottom of the wage distribution, and the decline in aggregate wage mobility since the 1980s is concentrated there. The overall decline can be mostly attributed to a reduction in wage mobility per mover, which is due to a compositional shift toward lower-wage movers.

This paper examines how employer- and worker-specific productivity shocks transmit to earnings and employment. We develop an equilibrium search model and characterize the optimal contract offered by firms. Risk-neutral firms provide partial insurance against shocks to risk-averse workers and offer contingent contracts, where payments are backloaded in good times and frontloaded in bad times. The model is estimated on matched employer-employee data from Sweden. Firms absorb persistent worker and firm shocks, with respective passthrough values of 26 and 10 percent. We evaluate the effects of redistributive policies and find that 30 percent of government insurance is undone by crowding out firm insurance. (JEL D86, H23, J24, J31, J41, J62)

Nous présentons un modèle simple d’investissements en capital humain qui peut tenir compte d’une grande hétérogénéité entre agents, et nous étudions sa compatibilité avec certains modèles de recherche d’emploi et de salaire d’équilibre qui ont été proposés dans la littérature. Nous montrons que l’équation de salaire en logarithme dérivée de la combinaison de ces modèles est additivement séparable dans le processus d’investissement en capital humain et dans les effets dynamiques de l’échelle des emplois sous certaines conditions parmi lesquelles figurent des contraintes de liquidité strictes et l’exogénéité de la recherche d’emploi. C’est le cas en particulier du modèle populaire proposé par Bagger et al. [2014] dans lequel l’équation de salaire prédite peut être généralisée pour tenir compte d’effets hétérogènes plus riches dus à l’accumulation endogène de capital humain .

We develop a Heterogeneous Agents New Keynesian (HANK) model with a job ladder and endogenous on-the-job search (OJS) that challenges the traditional view of a negative relationship between unemployment and inflation. On the one hand, OJS is inflationary, sparking wage competition among firms to attract or retain workers. On the other hand, OJS strengthens workers’ bargaining power, reducing firms’ incentives to post vacancies and thereby increasing unemployment. The model explains the effects of the 2012 Danish tax reform, which influenced OJS differentially across the income distribution, on the employment transitions and wage growth observed in the microdata

We study labor market dynamics of workers in a highly competitive industry with a highly competitive labor market. We focus on the relationship between workers’ age, wages, and productivity. Our analysis uncovers an inverse U-shaped relationship. While some wage adjustments occur within the current firm, job mobility plays a crucial role in shaping wage trajectories. There is assortative matching with highly productive workers moving to highly productive firms, while less productive workers gravitate towards less productive firms. Our findings suggest that both in-firm wage progression and wage growth via job mobility contribute to a close alignment between wages and productivity throughout workers’ careers. • We study age–wage–productivity dynamics in a highly competitive labor market. • We find an inverse U-shaped relationship between age and both wages and productivity. • Job mobility drives wage progression alongside within-firm adjustments. • Wage trajectories closely track productivity over the career cycle.

In this paper, we highlight knowledge as specific channel through which labour mobility affects conditional within-firm wage dispersion. We present a model in which workers acquire knowledge on the job and firms pursue a policy of learning-by-hiring. The latter generates workers flows that connect firms in a network. A firm’s position in the network depends on its capacity to absorb the tacit knowledge developed by other firms in the economy. The model predicts that firms central to the network, those with the highest absorptive capacity of tacit knowledge, have the highest wage dispersion. Using 1995-2001 Veneto (a region of Italy) matched employer-employee data, we map workers flows between firms and build the network formed by all the firms. For each firm, we assess its network centrality. In our data conditional within-firm wage dispersion turns out to be increasing in network centrality, confirming the prediction of the model.

This paper integrates the classic theory of firm boundaries, through span of control or taste for variety, into a model of the labor market with random matching and on‐the‐job search. Firms choose when to enter and exit, whether to create vacancies or destroy jobs in response to shocks, and Bertrand‐compete to hire and retain workers. Tractability is obtained by proving that, under a parsimonious set of assumptions, all worker and firm decisions are characterized by their joint surplus, which in turn only depends on firm productivity and size. The job ladder in marginal surplus that emerges in equilibrium determines net poaching patterns by firm characteristics that are in line with the data. As frictions vanish, the model converges to a standard competitive model of firm dynamics. The combination of firm dynamics and search frictions allows the model to: (i) quantify the misallocation cost of frictions; (ii) replicate elusive life‐cycle growth profiles of superstar firms; and (iii) make sense of the failure of the job ladder around the Great Recession as a result of the collapse of firm entry.

It is well known that exporting rms pay higher wages and are more skill intensive than domestically-oriented rms. In this paper, we measure and decompose the exporter wage gap into several explanatory components by estimating counterfactual distributions for the Spanish manufacturing sector between 1995 and 2010 using matched employer{employee data. We nd that conditional wages are more compressed at exporting rms, dierences in characteristics are relatively less important at the center of the distribution, and that the plot of dierences in unobservable characteristics has an inverted-U shape. Separate analysis by education and sex shows that workers with higher levels of education receive a lower premium than workers with a low or medium education at exporting rms. Women earn less than men, but dierences are overcome {and even inverted{ at the highest levels of education. Evolution over time reveals that the exporter wage gap varies pro-cyclically and in an opposite direction to economy-wide wage inequality due to changes in wage premia but more importantly due to changes in workforce composition. These ndings imply that the exporting sector contributes ambiguously to generate {between-group and within-group{ wage inequality, depending on the position of the economy along the business cycle.