Residual Wage Inequality Research Articles

The pro-competitive consequences of trade in frictional labor markets

What are the pro-competitive consequences of trade in frictional labor markets? This paper develops and estimates a dynamic general equilibrium trade model to show that the interplay between endogenously variable markups in product markets and frictions in labor markets has important implications for aggregate as well as distributional consequences of trade. In particular, I show that once markups are allowed to respond to trade liberalization, unemployment and residual wage inequality rise almost three times more than in a model with constant markups (in the steady state). The presence of labor market frictions makes the pro-competitive gains from trade liberalization negative.

WAGE RISK, EMPLOYMENT RISK, AND THE RISE IN WAGE INEQUALITY

AbstractU.S. male residual wage inequality rose, and the employment rate fell between 1983 and 2013. Using a structural labor market model, we show that rising idiosyncratic wage risk and lower taxes at the bottom of the earnings distribution are the main forces behind rising wage inequality. The former contributes to the falling employment rate. Falling real wages and rising disability risk further depressed employment of workers without a college degree and rising exogenous job destruction depressed employment of workers with a college degree. Higher idiosyncratic risk entails large welfare losses with the largest losses among workers without a college degree.

Exporters, Multinationals and Residual Wage Inequality: Evidence And Theory

This paper studies the implications for wage inequality of two distinct forms of globalisation, namely trade and foreign direct investment. I use German linked employer-employee data to (1) jointly estimate the exporter and the multinational wage premium and (2) to further distinguish between wage premia of multinational firms that are foreign owned (inward FDI) and domestically owned (outward FDI). My findings exhibit a clear hierarchy of firms’ international activities with regard to wage premia and workforce ability. I interpret these patterns using a theoretical framework, which incorporates ex-ante homogeneous workers, heterogeneous firms and search and matching frictions into a multi-region model of trade and FDI with monopolistic competition. The model allows me to account for the observed empirical patterns, and delivers novel insights about the interplay between trade, FDI and labour market institutions.

Cross-Sectional Facts for Macroeconomists: Wage, Income and Consumption Inequality in Turkey

We investigate the evolution of Turkey’s wage, income and consumption inequalities using a cross-country comparable methodology and the Turkish Statistical Institute’s Household Budget Survey and the Survey of Income and Living Conditions micro data sets. Turkey’s wage, income and consumption inequalities all exhibit downward time trends over the 2002-2016 period. This observation aligns well with the rapid minimum wage growth over the period. While wage inequality estimates display strong countercyclicality, income and consumption inequalities exhibit rather acyclical time-series movements. While recent education premium estimates of Turkey are similar to those in the early 2000s, estimates of recent gender and experience premiums, as well as residual wage inequality are lower. Income and consumption inequality estimates exhibit similar time trends with moderate level differences, and these trends are robust to the choice of inequality metrics.

Exporters, Multinationals and Residual Wage Inequality: Evidence and Theory

This paper studies the implications for wage inequality of two distinct forms of globalisation, namely trade and foreign direct investment. I use German linked employer-employee data to (1) jointly estimate the exporter and the multinational wage premium and (2) to further distinguish between wage premia of multinational firms that are foreign owned (inward FDI) and domestically owned (outward FDI). My findings exhibit a clear hierarchy of firms’ international activities with regard to wage premia and workforce ability. I interpret these patterns using a theoretical framework, which incorporates ex-ante homogeneous workers, heterogeneous firms and search and matching frictions into a multi-region model of trade and FDI with monopolistic competition. The model allows me to account for the observed empirical patterns, and delivers novel insights about the interplay between trade, FDI and labour market institutions.

Within-Job Wage Inequality: Performance Pay and Job Relatedness

Over the past few decades, we find that about 80% of the widening residual wage inequality to be within jobs. We propose performance-pay incidence and job relatedness as two primary factors driving within-job inequality and embed them into a sorting equilibrium framework. We show that equilibrium sorting is positive assortative both within-job and across jobs. While performance-pay position amplifies within-job wage inequality through self-selection, the overall relationship between job relatedness and within-job wage inequality is found generally ambiguous. To quantify the role played by these factors, we calibrate the model to the US economy in 2000, where the model can account around 92% of the changes in within-job inequality among the highly educated from 1990 to 2000. Counterfactual analysis shows the contributions of performance-pay incidence and job relatedness are about 42% and 26%, respectively, both higher than that of job-specific productivity. While performance-pay incidence is particularly crucial for within-job wage dispersion in business/professional industry and professional occupation, job relatedness is the most important for mining/goods/construction industry and sales occupation.

Trade-Induced Job Turnover and Unemployment: The Role of Variable Demand Elasticity

This paper develops an open economy dynamic general equilibrium model to quantify a new mechanism that substantially magnifies trade-induced changes in labor market outcomes. The model features matching frictions in the labor market and variable demand elasticities in product markets. Because openness increases demand elasticities in product markets, it makes firms' employment decisions more responsive to their idiosyncratic shocks. This in turn raises aggregate job turnover, unemployment, and residual wage inequality in steady state. Fitted to Colombian plant-level data, my model explains the rise in these labor market variables that accompanied Colombia's trade liberalization, while a restricted version of the model that imposes constant demand elasticities fails to do so.

Explaining the Unexplained: Residual Wage Inequality, Manufacturing Decline and Low-skilled Immigration

This article investigates whether the increasing ‘residual wage inequality’ trend, which is responsible for most of the wage inequality phenomenon, is related to manufacturing decline and the influx of low-skilled immigrants. The analysis exploits variation across locations in the United States, and shows that a shrinking manufacturing sector increases inequality. This effect strengthens with an influx of low-skilled immigrants. Similar results are found for the increasing return to education and the decline in the employment rate. The evidence suggests that manufacturing decline is producing downward pressure on the relative wages of workers at the low end of the income distribution.

Education Development and Wage Inequality in Urban China

Using a representative household survey for 1995, 2002, 2007, and 2013, we show that education plays a pivotal role in shaping wage inequality in urban China. We find that education was a major contributor to increased wage inequality between 1995 and 2013. The returns to education remained high after 2007 despite a large inflow of college-educated workers. Although regional wage inequality declined from 2007–13, regional wage inequality among educated workers did not. Residual wage inequality increased, and the within inequality of educated workers increased faster than that of the less educated. We argue that China's education expansion seems insufficient to narrow the educational wage gap, and a lack of labor mobility for educated workers prevents the decline in returns to education in specific regions.

Labor Demand and Unequal Payments: Does Wage Dispersion Matter? Using German Employer-Employee Data to Analyze the Influence of Intra-Firm Wage Inequality on Labor Demand

AbstractA theoretical analysis examines the relationship between intra-firm wage dispersion and employment at establishments. The analysis relies on the absence of a theoretical consensus regarding the influence of wage dispersion on labor demand. To prove the theoretical considerations, regressions were conducted on German linked employer-employee data from the Institute for Employment Research (LIAB) for 1996 through 2008. More specifically, fractional probit models for the panel data and a fixed effects regression with a log-odds transformation of the dependent variable were used to estimate the share equations of a labor demand model, including different measures of wage dispersion. The results illustrate a negative influence of the residual wage inequality that takes into account the composition of the workforce in the establishment. In addition, an increasing wage dispersion at the lower end of the wage distribution decreases the labor demand of the establishment; however, this leads to the estimates of the overall wage dispersion becoming insignificant.

Inequality Between and Within Skill Groups: The Curious Case of India

Summary Wage inequality has risen in India over the past three decades. A similar phenomenon has been documented widely for other developing countries. However, unlike in other countries, which saw widening wage structures both between and within skill groups, I show that inequality in India increased between groups but fell within them over the period 1983–2005. Returns to education increased with the wages of college graduates rising relative to high school graduates who, in turn, earned increasingly more than less educated workers. But workers within education groups witnessed lower wage dispersion over time. Defining demographic groups more narrowly, by additionally including characteristics such as experience, gender, industry, and state, among others, regression results show that inequality increased between them while simultaneously declining within them, as indicated by a compression of the residual wage inequality. Decomposition analysis attributes the decline in wage dispersion within groups to falling returns to unobservable characteristics. This, previously undocumented, divergent trend in inequality between and within skill groups in India cannot be explained by the three main arguments in the extant literature for why developing countries have witnessed a rise in wage inequality in recent decades following trade liberalization—greater imports of skill-complementary technology, offshoring, and reallocation of skilled labor toward exporting firms. I provide several pieces of suggestive evidence to argue that reduction in labor market frictions and growth in offshored tasks from developed countries that are routine in content, but performed by high-skilled workers, can lead to the divergent trends in inequality between and within groups. Compositional changes in the labor force do not account for the inequality patterns witnessed in India.

A breakdown of residual wage inequality in Germany: wage decompositions using worker-, plant-, region-, and sector-specific determinants

The present paper applies regression-based decomposition methods to analyse the impact of worker-, plant-, region-, and sector-specific determinants on the level and the continuous increase in wage inequality between 1995 and 2007 in Germany. Almost the entire increase in wage inequality is explained by this approach. Altogether, changes in the composition of wage determinants are minor compared to changes in their returns. In particular, occupation-specific skills are the most important wage determinant. Changes in the age structure, unemployment rates, and the plant size premium in combination with assortative matching are also important factors that contribute to the rise in wage inequality.

Understanding Wage Inequality in Australia

In this paper we document the rise in wage inequality in Australia over the last decade. A key driver of this inequality is unobservable or residual inequality. We decompose residual wage inequality into permanent and transitory components. The estimates of the permanent shock from the first‐difference approach allow us to reconcile life‐cycle wage inequality.

Trade and inequality in a directed search model with firm and worker heterogeneity

AbstractThis paper integrates the insight that exporting firms are typically more productive and employ higher‐skilled workers into a directed search model of the labour market. The model generates a skill premium as well as residual wage inequality among identical workers. A trade liberalization increases the skill premium and likely increases residual inequality among high‐skilled workers. The calibrated model generates results consistent with the prior literature examining the effect of the Canada‐US Free Trade Agreement on the Canadian labour market: a significant decrease in employment in manufacturing, but only a small change in unemployment and wages.

Global Innovation Races, Offshoring and Wage Inequality

AbstractIn the 1970s and 1980s the US position as the global technological leader was increasingly challenged by Japan and Europe. In those years the US skill premium and residual wage inequality increased substantially. This paper presents a two‐region, quality‐ladder growth model where the lagging economy progressively catches up with the leader. As the innovation gap closes, the advanced country experiences fiercer foreign technological competition that forces its firms to innovate more. Faster technical change increases the skill premium and residual inequality. Offshoring production and innovation plays a key role in shaping the link between international competition and inequality.

Exporters and wage inequality during the Great Recession—Evidence from Germany

We show that the exporter wage premium decreased at the dawn of the Great Recession and stagnated afterwards. Our decomposition suggests that the decline of the premium explains 24%–43% of the decrease in residual wage inequality between 2007 and 2008.

Explaining the Unexplained: Residual Wage Inequality, Manufacturing Decline, and Low-Skilled Immigration

This paper investigates whether the increasing residual wage trend is related to manufacturing decline and the influx of low-skilled immigrants. There is a vast literature arguing that technological change, international trade, and institutional factors have played a significant role in the inequality trend. However, most of the trend is unexplained by observable factors. This paper attempts to explain the growth in the unexplained variance of wages by exploiting variation across locations (states or cities) in the United States in the local level of residual The evidence shows that a shrinking manufacturing sector increases inequality. In addition, an influx of low-skilled immigrants increases inequality, but this effect is concentrated in areas with a steeper manufacturing decline. Similar results are found for two alternative measures linked to increasing inequality: the increasing return to education and the decline in the employment rate of non-college men. The overall evidence suggests that the manufacturing and immigration trends have hollowed-out the overall demand for middle-skilled workers in all sectors, while increasing the supply of workers in lower skilled jobs. Both phenomena are producing downward pressure on the relative wages of workers at the low end of the income distribution.

Residual Wage Inequality and Immigration in the USA and the UK

Over the last few decades, immigration has increased significantly in both the US and the UK; both countries have also experienced notable increases in the degree of wage inequality. Unlike previous studies, this paper focuses on the effects of immigration on the residual wage inequality in the UK and US between 1994 and 2008. It seeks to assess whether and to what degree immigration contributed, along with technology, institutions and traditional explanations, to widening inequality. To answer these questions, this work reassesses Lemieux’s hypothesis (i.e., composition effects exert an upward mechanical force on the residual wage inequality) by adding the immigration dimension to the original analysis. The empirical analysis reveals that residual wage inequality is higher among immigrants than among natives. However, such differences do not contribute (much) to the increasing residual wage inequality observed in the two countries.

Quantifying the Contribution of Search to Wage Inequality

We empirically establish that one-third of job transitions leads to wage losses. Using a quantitative on-the-job search model, we find that 60 percent of them are movements down the job ladder. Accounting for them, our baseline calibration matches the large residual wage inequality in US data while attributing only 13.7 percent of overall wage inequality to the presence of search frictions in the labor market. We can trace the difference between ours and previous much higher estimates to our explicit modeling of nonvalue improving job-to-job transitions. (JEL J24, J31, J64)

How do social networks contribute to wage inequality? Insights from an agent-based analysis

Based on a closed agent-based macroeconomic simulation model (Eurace@Unibi), this article analyzes whether the density of social networks influences via referrals the residual wage inequality in different skill groups. It is shown that an increase in network density leads to a polarization of firms and a concentration of workers with high specific skills at firms with high productivities (and wages) thereby enlarging within group wage inequality, but not between group wage inequality.