IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iza/izadps/dp16663.html

Non-Wage Job Values and Implications for Inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Lehmann, Tobias

    (Swiss Federal Social Insurance Office)

Abstract

I study inequality in job values, both in terms of wages and non-wage values, in Austria over the period 1996 to 2011. I show that differences in non-wage job value between firms are non-parametrically identified from data on worker flows and wage differentials. Intuitively, firms with high non-wage value attract workers without paying a wage premium. I study the distribution of job value among workers and find a positive correlation between wage and non-wage value. Inequality in job value is thus considerably greater than wage inequality, reflected in the standard deviation of job value being more than twice as large as the standard deviation of wage. Job value inequality increases between 1996 and 2011, although wage inequality remains constant. An important reason is that, over time, dispersion of rents offered by firms increases, while compensating differentials lose importance.

Suggested Citation

  • Lehmann, Tobias, 2023. "Non-Wage Job Values and Implications for Inequality," IZA Discussion Papers 16663, IZA Network @ LISER.
    • Handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp16663
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://docs.iza.org/dp16663.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jason Sockin, 2022. "Show Me the Amenity: Are Higher-Paying Firms Better All Around?," CESifo Working Paper Series 9842, CESifo.
    2. Alfred Stiglbauer & Florian Stahl & Rudolf Winter-Ebmer & Josef Zweimüller, 2003. "Job Creation and Job Destruction in a Regulated Labor Market: The Case of Austria," Empirica, Springer;Austrian Institute for Economic Research;Austrian Economic Association, vol. 30(2), pages 127-148, June.
    3. Alan Manning, 2021. "Monopsony in Labor Markets: A Review," ILR Review, Cornell University, ILR School, vol. 74(1), pages 3-26, January.
    4. M. J. Andrews & L. Gill & T. Schank & R. Upward, 2008. "High wage workers and low wage firms: negative assortative matching or limited mobility bias?," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 171(3), pages 673-697, June.
    5. Thibaut Lamadon & Magne Mogstad & Bradley Setzler, 2022. "Imperfect Competition, Compensating Differentials, and Rent Sharing in the US Labor Market," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 112(1), pages 169-212, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Aum, Sangmin & Kim, Bongseop & Lee, Jungmin, 2025. "Why do you like or dislike your job?," Labour Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
    2. Kline, Patrick, 2024. "Firm wage effects," Handbook of Labor Economics,, Elsevier.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kline, Patrick, 2024. "Firm wage effects," Handbook of Labor Economics,, Elsevier.
    2. Jose Garcia-Louzao & Alessandro Ruggieri, 2023. "Labor Market Competition and Inequality," Bank of Lithuania Working Paper Series 117, Bank of Lithuania.
    3. Patrick M. Kline, 2024. "Firm Wage Effects," NBER Working Papers 33084, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    4. Labanca, Claudio & Pozzoli, Dario, 2022. "Hours Constraints and Wage Differentials across Firms," IZA Discussion Papers 14992, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    5. Ihsaan Bassier & Joshua Budlender, 2025. "When do employers share? Rent sharing, monopsony and minimum wages," CEP Discussion Papers dp2134, Centre for Economic Performance, LSE.
    6. Benjamin Lochner & Christian Merkl, 2026. "Gender-Specific Application Behaviour, Matching, and the Residual Gender Earnings Gap," The Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 136(673), pages 97-124.
    7. Bíró, Anikó & Branyiczki, Réka & Lindner, Attila & Márk, Lili & Prinz, Daniel, 2022. "Firm Heterogeneity and the Impact of Payroll Taxes," Policy Research Working Paper Series 10265, The World Bank.
    8. Hou, Shihang & Heath Milsom, Luke, 2025. "The Role of Firms and Occupations in Wage Inequality," VfS Annual Conference 2025 (Cologne): Revival of Industrial Policy 325461, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
    9. Jason Sockin, 2022. "Show Me the Amenity: Are Higher-Paying Firms Better All Around?," CESifo Working Paper Series 9842, CESifo.
    10. Peter Hull & Michal Kolesár & Christopher Walters, 2022. "Labor by design: contributions of David Card, Joshua Angrist, and Guido Imbens," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 124(3), pages 603-645, July.
    11. Ajay Bhaskarabhatla & Luis Cabral & Deepak Hegde & Thomas Peeters, 2021. "Are Inventors or Firms the Engines of Innovation?," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(6), pages 3899-3920, June.
    12. Erik Hurst & Patrick J. Kehoe & Elena Pastorino & Thomas Winberry, 2022. "The Distributional Impact of the Minimum Wage in the Short and Long Run," Staff Report 640, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
    13. Morchio, Iacopo & Moser, Christian, 2018. "The Gender Pay Gap: Micro Sources and Macro Consequences," MPRA Paper 99276, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 24 Mar 2020.
    14. Dami'an Vergara, 2022. "Minimum Wages and Optimal Redistribution," Papers 2202.00839, arXiv.org, revised Dec 2022.
    15. Huitfeldt, Ingrid & Kostøl, Andreas R. & Nimczik, Jan & Weber, Andrea, 2023. "Internal labor markets: A worker flow approach," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 233(2), pages 661-688.
    16. Dan A. Black & Lars Skipper & Jeffrey A. Smith & Jeffrey Andrew Smith, 2023. "Firm Training," CESifo Working Paper Series 10268, CESifo.
    17. Dobbelaere, Sabien & Hirsch, Boris & Müller, Steffen & Neuschaeffer, Georg, 2020. "Organised Labour, Labour Market Imperfections, and Employer Wage Premia," IZA Discussion Papers 13909, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    18. Tania Babina & Wenting Ma & Christian Moser & Paige Ouimet & Rebecca Zarutskie, 2019. "Pay, Employment, and Dynamics of Young Firms," Working Papers 19-23, Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau.
    19. Langella, Monica & Manning, Alan Patrick, 2021. "The measure of monopsony," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 113925, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    20. Bertay, Ata Can & Carreño, José & Huizinga, Harry & Uras, Burak & Vellekoop, Nathanael, 2022. "Technological change and the finance wage premium," SAFE Working Paper Series 361, Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • J31 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
    • J32 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - Nonwage Labor Costs and Benefits; Retirement Plans; Private Pensions

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iza:izadps:dp16663. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Mark Fallak (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/izaaalu.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.