Wages, Employer Costs, and Employee Performance in the Firm

Analyzing data from a 1982 survey of firms, the author finds evidence that firms' wage levels are positively associated with the previous experience of new hires, the tenure of employees with the firm, managers' perceptions of employee productivity, and managers' perceptions of the ease of hiring qualified workers; they are negatively associated with job vacancy rates and training time. Although the magnitudes of some of these relationships are not large, in combination they suggest that high-wage firms can sometimes offset more than half of their higher wage costs through improved productivity and lower hiring and turnover costs. The effects are generally stronger for firms that have chosen high wage levels than for firms in which unions have imposed high wage levels.