Dynamique des salaires dans une cohorte

This article examines 1976-1998 annual wage data for a male cohort entering the labor market in 1976. Thanks to the richness of the data, we can analyze wage dynamics during a portion of the cohort?s life cycle ? unlike nearly all other studies on the subject, which are obliged to combine different cohorts in order to obtain a sufficient number of observations. We use a pseudo-maximum-likelihood method to estimate various dynamic ARMA panel models with individual effects and time-heterogeneous variances. The results indicate that wage variance, and therefore inequality, rise substantially at the start of the life cycle but appear to stagnate before the end of wage growth. Our estimates show that the process orders are significantly higher than those reported in the literature and are of the ARMA(4,2) type. The estimates highlight the weight of the permanent component reflecting individual effects, which accounts for 60% of the variance of wage residuals.