Unobserved Ability, Efficiency Wages, and Interindustry Wage Differentials

Unobserved Ability, Efficiency Wages, and Interindustry Wage Differentials
Author: McKinley L. Blackburn
Publisher:
Total Pages: 40
Release: 1991
Genre: Ability
ISBN:

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Interindustry wage differentials in wage regressions estimated for individuals have been interpreted as evidence consistent with efficiency wage models. A principal competing explanation is that these differentials are generated by differences across workers in unobserved ability. This paper tests the unobserved ability hypothesis .by incorporating test scores into standard wage regressions as error-ridden indicators of unobserved ability. The results indicate that differences in unobserved ability explain relatively little of interindustry or interoccupation wage differentials.

Interindustry Wage Differentials and Unobserved Ability

Interindustry Wage Differentials and Unobserved Ability
Author: Anders Bjorklund
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2007
Genre:
ISBN:

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We examine the role of unobserved ability in explaining interindustry wage differentials. By using data on brothers, we account for unmeasured abilities shared by siblings. The data came from four Nordic countries and the United States. In the Nordic countries, only a moderate proportion of the variability in industry wages can be attributed to unobserved ability, while unmeasured factors explain as much as half of the U.S. industry-wage variation. Accounting for such differences, we show that the U.S. interindustry wage dispersion is similar with that in the Nordic countries.

Unobserved Worker Quality and Inter-industry Wage Differentials

Unobserved Worker Quality and Inter-industry Wage Differentials
Author: Suqin Ge
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2020
Genre:
ISBN:

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This study quantitatively assesses two alternative explanations for inter-industry wage differentials: worker heterogeneity in the formof unobserved quality and firmheterogeneity in the form of a firm's willingness to pay (WTP) for workers' productive attributes. We develop an empirical hedonic model of labor demand and apply a two-stage nonparametric procedure to recover worker and firm heterogeneities. In the first stage we recover unmeasured worker quality by estimating market-specific hedonic wage functions nonparametrically. In the second stage we infer each firm's WTP parameters for worker attributes by using first-order conditions from the demand model. We apply our approach to quantify inter-industry wage differentials on the basis of individual data from the NLSY79 and find that worker quality accounts for approximately two thirds of the inter-industry wage differentials.