Doctoral Dissertation Research: Market concentration, skill segregation, and rising wage inequality

一家公司的经理和员工之间的薪酬差异是惊人的，也得到了很多研究，但过去40年来不平等的加剧主要是因为在不同雇主工作的人之间的差异越来越大，而不是那些一起工作的人之间的差异。这一事实很难解释用工人教育水平差异来解释不平等的理论：即使是受教育程度相近的工人，他们的工资也会根据他们最终工作的公司而有所不同。相反，这个项目旨在通过衡量竞争对手公司之间竞争强度的变化以及买家和供应商公司之间力量平衡的变化来解释日益加剧的不平等。通过研究不同工作场所工资差异的来源，该项目指出了一套针对雇主的新政策，以解决日益加剧的工资不平等问题。这里提出的研究可能有助于评估反垄断执法、竞争政策和产品市场监管如何影响工资结构。倡导者和政策制定者都忽视了这些间接的不平等政策决定因素。为了澄清公司之间不平等加剧的根源，这个项目将经济社会学的见解引入到不平等的分析中。它建立在结构主义工资社会学的基础上，并对其进行了重新阐述，以探讨公司之间的等级关系如何影响工资不平等。市场力量的变化预计将通过在不同雇主之间转移好工作和高工资的分配来影响不平等。具体地说，该项目使用机构级和关联的雇主-雇员数据来测试公司之间关系变化的几个促成来源。首先，它考虑了产品市场力量的转移是否让一些公司和工人受益，是否削弱了另一些公司和工人。其次，它询问供应商公司对强大的企业买家的依赖如何影响供应商？工人？工资。最后，它测试了不同工作场所的教育和职业隔离趋势是否导致了不平等的加剧。更广泛地说，它问的是产品市场的结构性对工资分配的影响：如果企业在偏离完美市场假设的环境下运营，对他们的工人会产生什么后果？工资呢？

Pay differences between a company's managers and its workers are striking, and much studied, but the rise in inequality over the last 40 years has come mostly from growing differences between people working at different employers, not between those working together. This fact is hard to explain for theories that explain inequality with differences in workers' education levels: even similarly-educated workers get paid differently depending on which companies they end up working at. This project instead aims to explain rising inequality by measuring changes in the intensity of competition between rival companies and changes in the balance of power between buyer and supplier companies. By studying the sources of pay differences between workplaces, this project points to a novel set of employer-targeted policies to address rising wage inequality. The research proposed here could help assess how antitrust enforcement, competition policy and product market regulation affect the wage structure. Advocates and policy makers alike have neglected these indirect policy determinants of inequality.To clarify the sources of rising between-firm inequality, this project brings insights from economic sociology to the analysis of inequality. It builds on and reformulates the structuralist sociology of wages to ask how hierarchical relations between firms can affect wage inequality. Changes in market power are expected to affect inequality by shifting the allocation of good jobs and high wages across different employers. Specifically, the project uses establishment-level and linked employer-employee data to test several contributing sources of changing relations between firms. First, it considers whether shifting product market power has benefited some firms and workers and undermined others. Second, it asks how the reliance of supplier firms on powerful corporate buyers affects suppliers? workers? wages. Finally, it tests whether trends in educational and occupational segregation across workplaces contribute to rising inequality. More broadly, it asks about the consequences of the structured nature of product markets for the distribution of wages: if businesses operate in settings that depart from the assumptions of perfect markets, what are the consequences for their workers? wages?