Download or read book The Firm level Link Between Productivity Dispersion and Wage Inequality written by Chiara Criscuolo and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 47 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Differences in average wages across firms - which account for around one-half of overall wage inequality - are mainly explained by differences in firm wage premia (the part of wages that depends exclusively on characteristics of firms) rather than workforce composition. Using a new cross-country dataset of linked employer-employee data, this paper investigates the role of cross-firm dispersion in productivity in explaining dispersion in firm wage premia, as well as the factors shaping the link between productivity and wages at the firm level. The results suggest that around 15% of cross-firm differences in productivity are passed on to differences in firm wage premia. The degree of pass-through is systematically larger in countries and industries with more limited job mobility, where low-productivity firms can afford to pay lower wage premia relative to high-productivity ones without a substantial fraction of workers quitting their jobs. Stronger product market competition raises pass-through while more centralised bargaining and higher minimum wages constrain firm-level wage setting at any given level of productivity dispersion. From a policy perspective, the results suggest that the key priority should be to promote job mobility, which would reduce wage differences between firms while easing the efficient reallocation of workers across them.

Download or read book The Evolution of Inequality in Productivity and Wages written by Giulia Faggio and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Role of Firms in Wage Inequality Policy Lessons from a Large Scale Cross Country Study written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2021-12-09 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Even though firms play a key role in shaping wages, wage inequality and the gender wage gap, firms have so far only featured to a limited extent in the policy debates around these issues. The evidence in this volume shows that around one third of overall wage inequality can be explained by gaps in pay between firms rather than differences in the level and returns to workers’ skills.

Download or read book Capital Account Liberalization and Wage Inequality Evidence from Firm Level Data written by Kodjovi M. Eklou and published by International Monetary Fund. This book was released on 2023-03-03 with total page 35 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Firms play an important role in shaping income inequality at the aggregated country level, given that wages represent a significant proportion of household income. We investigate the distributional consequences of capital account liberalization, relying on firm level data to explore the implications for betweenfirms earning inequality in ASEAN5 countries over the period 1995-2019. We find that between-firms wage dispersion alone, accounts for a nontrivial proportion of the variation in the market Gini. Our empirical findings show that capital account liberalization increases between-firms wage inequality, as wages grow faster at initially high-paying firms and slow-down at firms at the lower portion of the wage distribution. These results are robust to a battery of robustness checks. Further, the directions and categories of capital account liberalization matter as results are pronounced for inflow liberalization and equity capital flows. We also show that capital account liberalization induces an increase in Profit-to-Wage ratios. Furthermore, the impact depends on country characteristics (wage setting institutions, the level of financial development and the size of the informal sector) as well as industry characteristics (export orientation and external finance dependence).

Download or read book The Structure of Wages written by Edward P. Lazear and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The distribution of income, the rate of pay raises, and the mobility of employees is crucial to understanding labor economics. Although research abounds on the distribution of wages across individuals in the economy, wage differentials within firms remain a mystery to economists. The first effort to examine linked employer-employee data across countries, The Structure of Wages:An International Comparison analyzes labor trends and their institutional background in the United States and eight European countries. A distinguished team of contributors reveal how a rising wage variance rewards star employees at a higher rate than ever before, how talent becomes concentrated in a few firms over time, and how outside market conditions affect wages in the twenty-first century. From a comparative perspective that examines wage and income differences within and between countries such as Denmark, Italy, and the Netherlands, this volume will be required reading for economists and those working in industrial organization.

Download or read book Rising Concentration and Wage Inequality written by Guido Matias Cortes and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wage inequality has risen in many countries over recent decades. At the same time, production has become increasingly concentrated in "superstar" firms. In this paper, we show that these two phenomena are linked. Theoretically, we show that shocks that increase concentration, such as an increase in consumers' price sensitivity, will also lead to an increase in wage dispersion between firms. Empirically, we use industry-level data from 14 European countries over the period 1999-2016 and show robust evidence of a positive and statistically significant correlation between concentration and the dispersion of firm-level wages.

Download or read book Wage Dispersion written by Dale Mortensen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A theoretical and empirical examination of wage differentials findsthat traditional theories of competition do not explain why workers with identical skills are paid differently.

Download or read book Firm Productivity Wages and Sorting written by Benjamin Lochner and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Increasing wage inequality is associated with changes in the degree of labor market sorting, i.e. the allocation of workers to firms. To measure sorting, we propose a new method which disentangles the respective contributions of worker and firm heterogeneity to wage inequality. Inspired by sorting theory, we infer firm productivity from estimating firm-level production functions, taking into account that worker ability and firm productivity may interact at the match level. Using German data, we find that highly productive firms display low labor shares, dominate concentrated markets, and pay lower wages than less productive firms. Sorting is positive, but lower than what wage-based measures suggest. It increases over time, driven by new matches between low-productivity firms and low-ability workers. At the top, sorting decreases, reflected in worker transitions away from high-productivity firms that pay relatively low wages. We discuss implications of our findings for the interpretation of increasing wage inequality.

Download or read book Firms and Labor Market Inequality written by David Card and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: 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, Kramarz and Margolis (1999), and can also match the typical "rent-sharing" elasticities estimated in the literature. Extended versions of the model can potentially explain differences in the wage premiums paid by a given employer to different subgroups of workers

Download or read book The Role of Firms in Wage Inequality Dynamics written by Martim Leitão and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper examines the mechanisms through which firms impact earnings inequality dynamics. Using a rich combination of administrative matched employer-employee-job title data, and detailed technology adoption firm surveys for Portugal, we show that the decrease in wage inequality has arisen from a compression in the firm pay premium, the job title pay premium and their covariance. These effects were mainly driven by a decline in passthrough from firm characteristics to pay, rather than changes in the distribution of these characteristics. Results show that workforce composition and labor productivity are the main drivers of firm pay premiums compression, and that this effect comes from a decline in returns to these characteristics. An increasing share of workers earning the minimum wage and a reduction in labor market concentration also contributed to the fall in between-firm pay premium dispersion but had smaller roles. We also find that technological adoption increases within-firm labor income inequality. Our results shed new light on how firms impact labor income inequality dynamics and have profound policy implications for the design of policies to mitigate inequality.

Download or read book Wage Dispersion and Firm Productivity in Different Working Environments written by Benoît Mahy and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This article investigates the impact of wage dispersion on firm productivity in different working environments. More precisely, it examines the interaction with: (i) the skills of the workforce, using a more appropriate indicator than the standard distinction between white- and blue-collar workers, and (ii) the uncertainty of the firm economic environment, which has, to our knowledge, never been explored on an empirical basis. Using detailed cross-sectional linked employer-employee data for Belgium, we find a hump-shaped relationship between (conditional) wage dispersion and firm productivity. This result suggests that up to (beyond) a certain level of wage dispersion, the incentive effects of 'tournaments' dominate (are dominated by) 'fairness' and/or 'sabotage' considerations. Findings also show that the intensity of the relationship is stronger for highly skilled workers and in more stable environments. This might be explained by the fact that monitoring costs and production-effort elasticity are greater for highly skilled workers, and that in the presence of high uncertainty, workers have less control over their effort-output relation, and associate higher uncertainty with more unfair environments.

Download or read book The Productivity Inclusiveness Nexus Preliminary version written by OECD and published by OECD Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-27 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This report proposes a new comprehensive approach to promote better productivity performance and reduce inequalities.

Download or read book Does Wage Dispersion Make All Firms Productive written by Benoît Mahy and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Wage Inequality in Latin America written by Julián Messina and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What caused the decline in wage inequality of the 2000s in Latin America? Looking to the future, will the current economic slowdown be regressive? Wage Inequality in Latin America: Understanding the Past to Prepare for the Future addresses these two questions by reviewing relevant literature and providing new evidence on what we know from the conceptual, empirical, and policy perspectives. The answer to the fi rst question can be broken down into several parts, although the bottom line is that the changes in wage inequality resulted from a combination of three forces: (a) education expansion and its eff ect on falling returns to skill (the supply-side story); (b) shifts in aggregate domestic demand; and (c) exchange rate appreciation from the commodity boom and the associated shift to the nontradable sector that changed interfi rm wage diff erences. Other forces had a non-negligible but secondary role in some countries, while they were not present in others. These include the rapid increase of the minimum wage and a rapid trend toward formalization of employment, which played a supporting role but only during the boom. Understanding the forces behind recent trends also helps to shed light on the second question. The analysis in this volume suggests that the economic slowdown is putting the brakes on the reduction of inequality in Latin America and will likely continue to do so—but it might not actually reverse the region’s movement toward less wage inequality.

Download or read book Wage Inequality and Firm Growth written by Holger M. Müller and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We examine how within-firm skill premia -- wage differentials associated with jobs involving different skill requirements -- vary both across firms and over time. Our firm-level results mirror patterns found in aggregate wage trends, except that we find them with regard to increases in firm size. In particular, we find that wage differentials between high- and either medium- or low-skill jobs increase with firm size, while those between medium- and low-skill jobs are either invariant to firm size or, if anything, slightly decreasing. We find the same pattern within firms over time, suggesting that rising wage inequality -- even nuanced patterns, such as divergent trends in upper- and lower-tail inequality -- may be related to firm growth. We explore two possible channels: i) wages associated with "routine" job tasks are relatively lower in larger firms due to a higher degree of automation in these firms, and ii) larger firms pay relatively lower entry-level managerial wages in return for providing better career opportunities. Lastly, we document a strong and positive relation between within-country variation in firm growth and rising wage inequality for a broad set of developed countries. In fact, our results suggest that part of what may be perceived as a global trend toward more wage inequality may be driven by an increase in employment by the largest firms in the economy.

Download or read book Wage and Productivity Dispersion in U S Manufacturing written by and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Inward Foreign Direct Investment Superstar Firms and Wage Inequality Between Firms written by Juan David Durán and published by . This book was released on 2023 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Theoretical models and international evidence have established that foreign direct investment is associated with new technologies, productivity gains, higher wages, and wage inequality in the host countries. While most existing studies on foreign direct investment and wage inequality have examined relative wages across skills, occupations and sectors, recent contributions to the theoretical and empirical literature highlight the role of wage dispersion between firms as an important driver of overall income inequality. Against this background, this paper examines wage dispersion between firms across European regions and the role played by multinational firms with dominant market shares, the so-called "superstar firms". Firstly, we document the evolution of wage dispersion between firms and the regional presence of foreign affiliates across European regions. Second, we empirically investigate the role of inward foreign direct investment as a driver of wage dispersion between firms across European regions. The analysis uses firm-level data from the ORBIS Europe data set over 2012-2021 combined with a range of data for European regions. Using a shift-share instrumental variables approach, we find that foreign direct investment, particularly international superstar firms, contributed to increased wage inequality between firms across European regions.