In this paper I use data from a survey of firms to estimate the effects of a firm's wage level on several measures of its hiring costs and the characteristics and performance of its employees. These measures include the previous experience and current tenure of its employees; subjective productivity scores for these employees; job vacancy rates; perceived ease of hiring qualified workers for the firs; and hours spent hiring and training new workers. In doing so, I distinguish the case of high wages imposed on s firm by unions from that in which the firm might be choosing its wage level in order to maximize its profits. I also provide some rough measures of the extent to which firms offset their high wage costs in each case. The results show generally positive effects of firm wages on employee experience and tenure as well as on subjective productivity scores. The firm's wages generally have negative effects on job vacancy rates and positive effects on the perceived ease of hiring qualified workers. Training time is also reduced. While the magnitude of each individual effect may not always be large or even significant, their combined effects suggest that firms offset a good deal of their higher wage costs through improved productivity and lower hiring and turnover costs among their employees.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number
2830.
Length: Date of creation: Apr 1990 Date of revision: Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2830
Note: LS Contact details of provider: Postal: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A. Phone: 617-868-3900 Email: Web page: http://www.nber.org More information through EDIRC
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: ().
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)