Dissecting Wage Dispersion

Wage and Technology Dispersion

This paper explains why firms with identical opportunities may use different technologies and offer different wages. Our key assumption is that workers must engage in costly search in order to gather information about jobs (Stigler, 1961). In equilibrium, some firms adopt high fixed cost, high productivity technologies, offer high wages, and fill job openings quickly. Other firms adopt less cap...

Wage Dispersion and Search Behavior ∗

We use a rich new body of data on the experiences of unemployed job-seekers to determine the sources of wage dispersion and to create a search model consistent with the acceptance decisions the job-seekers made. From the data and the model, we identify the distributions of four key variables: offered wages, offered non-wage job values, the value of the job-seeker’s non-work alternative, and the...

Acquisitions, Multinationals and Wage Dispersion

Multinational firms pay relatively high wages. Less is known about the wage structure within multinational and non-multinational firms. We examine the impact of acquisitions on wage dispersion in Sweden using a large matched employer-employee data set. Foreign acquisitions of Swedish firms increase wage dispersion by increasing wages for high-skilled workers. The positive impact is concentrated...

Frictional Wage Dispersion: A Puzzle?∗

This paper demonstrates that the standard search and matching models of equilibrium unemployment, once properly calibrated, can generate only a tiny amount of frictional wage dispersion, i.e., wage differentials among ex-ante similar workers induced purely by search frictions. The analysis is centered around a specific measure of wage dispersion— the ratio between the average wage and the lowes...

Wage Dispersion in Nonprofit Organizations: