Empirical and Theoretical Studies of Wages, Mobility, and Bargaining

现代工业经济的一个普遍特征是，在看似相似的工人之间，存在着巨大而持久的工资差异。耐用品制造业、采矿业、运输业和公用事业等行业支付的工资似乎比零售业和许多服务行业支付给同等工人的工资高出15%至30%。随着时间的推移，行业工资差异的模式非常稳定，并且在具有不同劳动力市场制度的国家之间相似。这些事实表明，这些差异在很大程度上既不是暂时的不平衡现象，也不是特定集体谈判机构或政府干预劳动力市场的人为产物。该项目开发了理论模型，可以解释有关这些行业和企业之间差异的观察模式的风格化事实，并对模型的新预测进行实证检验。这一点很重要，因为在对几个备受争议的政策问题的分析中，对行业工资差异的相互竞争的解释产生了非常不同的积极和规范的影响。例如，一组理论与非自愿失业和劳动力市场分割是一致的。其他的则不然。除了试图解释某些类型的工资差异之外，该项目还从理论上和经验上考察了它们的存在对劳动力市场决策的影响，如就业工人的流动决策、雇主的招聘和保留政策以及失业工人的求职行为。研究强调了匹配、学习和信息不对称在劳动力市场中的作用。

A pervasive feature of modern industrial economies is the existence of large and persistent wage differentials among seemingly similar workers. Industries such as durable-goods manufacturing, mining, transportation, and utilities appear to pay wages on the order of 15 to 30 percent higher than those paid by the retail trade and many service industries to observationally equivalent workers. The pattern of industry wage differentials is remarkably stable over time and similar across countries with distinct labor-market institutions. These facts suggest that the differentials are neither largely transitory disequilibrium phenomena nor the artifacts of particular collective bargaining institutions or government interventions in the labor market. This project develops theoretical models that can account for the stylized facts concerning the observed pattern of these differentials across industries and establishments and implements empirical tests of the new predictions of the models. This is important because the competing explanations of industry wage differences produce very different positive and normative implications in analyses of several much-debated policy issues. For example, one set of theories is consistent with involuntary unemployment and labor-market segmentation. The others are not. In addition to seeking to explain certain kinds of wage differentials, the project theoretically and empirically examines the effects their existence has on labor-market decisions such as the mobility decisions of employed workers, the recruiting and retention policies of employers, and the job-search behavior of unemployed workers. The research emphasizes the roles of matching, learning, and asymmetric information in the labor market.