Matched employer-employee data exhibits both wage and productivity dispersion across firms and suggest that a linear relationship holds between the average wage paid and a firm productivity. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that these facts can be explained by a search and matching model when firms are heterogenous with respect to productivity, are composed of many workers, and face diminishing returns to labor given the wage paid to identical workers is the solution to the Stole-Zwiebel bilateral bargaining problem. Helpman and Iskhoki (2008) show that a unique single wage (degenerate) equilibrium solution to the model exists in this environment. In this paper, I demonstrate that another equilibrium exists that can be characterized by a non-degenerate distribution of wages in which more productive firms pay more if employed workers are able to search. Generically this dispersed wage equilibrium is unique and exists if and only if firms are heterogenous with respect to factor productivity. Finally, employment is lower in the dispersed wage equilibrium than in the single wage equilibrium but this fact does not imply that welfare is higher in the single wage equilibrium.
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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
15033.
Length: Date of creation: Jun 2009 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:15033
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Find related papers by JEL classification: E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution J3 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search
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Pissarides, C A, 1984.
"Efficient Job Rejection,"
Economic Journal,
Royal Economic Society, vol. 94(376a), pages 97-108, Supplemen.
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