An Empirical Model of Wage Dispersion with Sorting / Jesper Bagger, Rasmus Lentz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bagger, Jesper.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Lentz, Rasmus.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w20031.

NBER working paper series no. w20031

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2014.

Summary:

This paper studies wage dispersion in an equilibrium on-the-job-search model with endogenous search intensity. Workers differ in their permanent skill level and firms differ with respect to productivity. Positive (negative) sorting results if the match production function is supermodular (submodular). The model is estimated on Danish matched employer-employee data. We find evidence of positive assortative matching. In the estimated equilibrium match distribution, the correlation between worker skill and firm productivity is 0.12. The assortative matching has a substantial impact on wage dispersion. We decompose wage variation into four sources: Worker heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity, frictions, and sorting. Worker heterogeneity contributes 51% of the variation, firm heterogeneity contributes 11%, frictions 23%, and finally sorting contributes 15%. We measure the output loss due to mismatch by asking how much greater output would be if the estimated population of matches were perfectly positively assorted. In this case, output would increase by 7.7%.

Notes:

Print version record

April 2014.