FIRMING UP INEQUALITY

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Song, Jae; Price, David J.; Guvenen, Fatih; Bloom, Nicholas; Von Wachter, Till
• 署名单位: University of Toronto; University of Minnesota System; University of Minnesota Twin Cities; Federal Reserve System - USA; National Bureau of Economic Research; Stanford University; Stanford University; University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
• 刊物名称: QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0033-5533
• DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjy025
• 发表日期: 2019
• 页码: 1-50
• 关键词: high wage workers; UNITED-STATES; earnings inequality; mobility

摘要

We use a massive, matched employer-employee database for the United States to analyze the contribution of firms to the rise in earnings inequality from 1978 to 2013. We find that one-third of the rise in the variance of (log) earnings occurred within firms, whereas two-thirds of the rise occurred due to a rise in the dispersion of average earnings between firms. However, this rising between-firm variance is not accounted for by the firms themselves but by a widening gap between firms in the composition of their workers. This compositional change can be split into two roughly equal parts: high-wage workers became increasingly likely to work in high-wage firms (i.e., sorting increased), and high-wage workers became increasingly likely to work with each other (i.e., segregation rose). In contrast, we do not find a rise in the variance of firm-specific pay once we control for the worker composition in firms. Finally, we find that two-thirds of the rise in the within-firm variance of earnings occurred within mega (10,000+ employee) firms, which saw a particularly large increase in the variance of earnings compared with smaller firms. JEL Codes: E23, J21, J31.