% WARNING: This file may contain UTF-8 (unicode) characters. % While non-8-bit characters are officially unsupported in BibTeX, you % can use them with the biber backend of biblatex % usepackage[backend=biber]{biblatex} @techreport{NBERw22850, title = "Firms and Labor Market Inequality: Evidence and Some Theory", author = "Card, David and Cardoso, Ana Rute and Heining, Jörg and Kline, Patrick", institution = "National Bureau of Economic Research", type = "Working Paper", series = "Working Paper Series", number = "22850", year = "2016", month = "November", doi = {10.3386/w22850}, URL = "http://www.nber.org/papers/w22850", 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.}, }