if not computers then what returns to computer use in the uk revisited in recent years much attention has been paid to the effect on wages of skill biased technology especially the use of computers although empirical studies have shown a positive relationship between computer use and earnings doubts have been cast on whether this is a causal relationship or merely represents unobserved other factors which are themselves positively linked to computer usage this study provides evidence that computers themselves raise wages although their impact on wages falls as other controls are included in the regression it still remains significant whilst the effect of another proxy for unobserved factors becomes insignificant furthermore improvements in computer use have an additional impact on earnings supporting the productivity interpretation

the role of firm size in bilateral bargaining a study of the cable television industry we examine the effect of buyer merger on bilateral negotiations between a supplier and n buyers merger may have bargaining effects in addition to the usual efficiency effects the effect of merger on the buyers bargaining position depends on the curvature of the supplier s gross surplus function merger enhances worsens the buyers bargaining position if the function is concave convex based on a panel of advertising revenue in the cable television industry our estimates indicate that the gross surplus function for suppliers of program services is convex this result suggests that cable operators integrate horizontally to realize efficiency gains rather than to enhance their bargaining position vis a vis program suppliers

how good are small firms are predicting employment this paper utilises some data from an interview survey of very small firms in the north of england to examine the relationship between actual and forecast employment in small firms over a twelve month period the paper first provides some summary statistics on actual and forecast employment for the survey firms over the reference period it then looks at how successful the firms are in their short term forecasts and finds that there is systematic over estimation the causes of the systematic forecast error are investigated it is suggested tentatively that the firms may in some way be incorrectly interpreting the information embodied in their own employment figures when making their forecasts the paper concludes with a brief review of the results and possible policy implications avenues for future work are also proposed

industry specific human capital occupation and firm size evidence from taiwan this paper investigates the importance of various types of human capital and highlights the role played by industry tenure in determining wages in taiwan it also aims to offer possible explanations as to why industry specific human capital is much less significant than it is in the united states empirically it is found that other things being equal accumulating industry tenure decreases earnings for both the least skilled workers and those employed in mid sized firms industry specific skills are not yet deeply implemented in most occupations and firms of all sizes this might also account for the remarkable level of labor reallocation among industries that is observed in taiwan furthermore the capital stock accumulated through education is found to be the most crucial in determining wages in all estimations and a factor considered the engine of growth during the miraculous development of taiwan s economy however the importance of other types of human capital on earnings namely general labor market experience and firm specific human capital varies substantially across groups

blind ambition the effects of social networks and institutional sex composition on the job search outcomes of elite coeducational and women s college graduates in this paper i develop a perspective on women s career attainment focused on how employers salary offers may be constructed based on their assumptions regarding women s access to comparative salary information therefore although the use of social networks in job search may enhance women s actual knowledge of prevailing wages i hypothesize that institutional characteristics that employers could assume to constrain women s networks and concomitant access to salary information will directly affect salary offers as well as moderating the influence of network ties on pay to test this perspective job search outcomes of women attending elite coeducational and women s colleges were examined regarding the number of offers obtained women who consulted with proportionally more male peer and employed adult male advice ties received significantly more job offers than women using fewer male advice contacts with regard to salary offers this study reveals an institutional sex composition effect women exiting single sex institutions i e women s colleges received significantly lower salary offers than women from coeducational schools even after accounting for human capital job characteristics and institutional reputation the effects of social networks on pay were moderated by institutional sex composition such that women exiting women s colleges received lower returns in the form of salary to their cross gender advice ties than did women from a matched coeducational institution implications of these results for theories of social capital and women s occupational attainment are discussed

wages and labor management in african manufacturing using matched employer employee data on 10 african countries this paper examines the relationship beween wages worker supervision and labor productivity in manufacturing wages increase with rm size for both production workers and supervisors we develop a two tier model of supervision that can account for this stylized fact and we t the structural model to the data employee data is used to derive a rm speci c wage premium that is purged of the effect of worker observables we nd as trong effect of both supervision and wages on effort and hence on labor productivity labor management in sub saharan africa appears problematic with much higher supervisor to worker ratios than in morocco and a higher elasticity of effort with respect to supervision

human capital and information this paper examines the issue of the establishment size wage effect it analyzes a cross section for the year 1979 with information on 607 individuals and the 60 private sector establishments where they work it discusses four theories of the establishment size wage effect and uses empirical proxies to test them it shows that when a dummy variable on computer access in the establishment is introduced as a regressor the establishment size variable is an insignificant regressor this result and other evidence supports the contention that the establishment size coefficient captures the effect of unobserved human capital accumulation

a selectivity model of employer size wage differentials this article investigates wage differentials for employees of different size firms utilizing an econometric methodology that allows the size of employer to be treated as endogenous in the context of discrete ordered employer size data as a result we are able to estimate i employer size wage gaps which are corrected for selectivity bias and ii the magnitude and direction of the selection bias decompositions of the resulting wage differentials are computed with comparisons of the conditional on sorting across employer size and unconditional wage gaps

o ring production on u s hog farms joint choices of farm size technology and compensation we hypothesize that hog production can be characterized by complementarities between new technologies worker skills and farms size such production processes are consistent with kremer s 1993 o ring production theory in which a single mistake in any one of several complementary tasks in a firm s production process can lead to catastrophic failure of the product s value in hog production mistakes that introduce disease or pathogens into the production facility can cause a total loss of the herd consistent with predictions derived from the o ring theory we provide evidence that the most skilled workers concentrate in the largest and most technologically advanced farms and are paid more than comparable workers on smaller farms these findings suggest that worker skills new technologies and farm size are complements in production the complementarities create returns to scale to large hog confinements consistent with the dramatic increase in market share of very large farms over the past 20 years

compensating differentials and unmeasured ability in the labor market for nurses why do hospitals pay more nurses employed in hospitals realize a large wage advantage relative to nurses employed elsewhere this paper examines alternative sources of the hospital premium a topic of some interest given the current shifting of medical care out of hospitals whereas cross sectional estimates indicate a hospital rn wage advantage of roughly 20 percent longitudinal analysis suggests that a third to a half of the advantage is due to unmeasured worker ability the remainder is likely to reflect compensating differentials for hospital disamenities we further probe possible sources of the rn hospital premium by examining the receipt of fringe benefits differences in cognitive ability as measured by afqt test scores differences in the quality of experience the role of labor unions and rents earnings on second jobs and the magnitude of wage differentials associated with work shift

canadian jobs and firm size do smaller firms pay less even after controlling for observable workers characteristics and for occupation and industry specific effects a substantial wage differential remains between large and small firms what underlies the remaining wage differential is unclear direct evidence on pension plan coverage and on lay off rates by firm size is inconsistent with the bad working conditions hypothesis the union avoidance hypothesis does not seem to explain an important portion o f the wage differential as suggested by efficiency wage models part of the remaining wage differential may be due to firms heterogeneity similarly perhaps large firms pay higher wages simply partly beca use they employ workers with more unobserved abilities because differen t explanations of the wage differential may lead to different policy implications determining the source of the wage firm size effect is an important question for future research

an experimental study of job evaluation and comparable worth the doctrine of comparable worth rests on an assumption that each job possesses an inherent worth independent of the market forces of supply and demand implementation of comparable worth further requires that inherentjob worth be measured with reasonable accuracy this paper reports the results of an experimental study of comparable worth three commercial job evaluation firms rated the same set of 27 jobs in an actual company statistical analysis of the experimental data indicates that the three evaluators differed in which job trait or constellation of traits they used to evaluate inherent job worth implying that at least one of them failed to measure inherent job worth accurately these results suggest that any attempt to implement comparable worth may be quite sensitive to the evaluator chosen to measure job worth

a theory of dual labor markets with application to industrial policy discrimination and keynesian unemployment this paper develops a model of dual labor markets based on employers need to motivate workers in order to elicit effort from their workers employers may find it optimal to pay more than the going wage this changes fundamentally the character of labor markets the model is applied to a wide range of labor market phenomena it provides a coherent framework for understanding the claims of industrial policy advocates it also can provide the basis for a theory of occupational segregation and discrimination that will not be eroded by market forces finally the model provides the basis for a theory of involuntary unemployment

work disutility and compensating differentials estimation of factors in the link between wages and firm size this paper investigates the positive wage firm size relationship using a sample of workers performing the same jobs in different sized firms controlling for skill differences wages are still found to be higher in larger firms using an estimate of the marginal rate of substitution of income for leisure as a measure of job disutility the difference in wages between large and small firms is found to be greater than the difference in disutility ruling out compensating differentials as the sole cause of the wage size relationship hence the argument that labor extracts some of the higher profits of larger firms is plausible

career interruptions following childbirth the aggregate probability of ending a career interruption that begins at childbirth is shown to diminish rapidly with the length of the interruption the empirical models estimated suggest that the decline can be explained by a combination of structural duration dependence unobserved heterogeneity and differences in observed characteristics the probability of returning to employment for a group of women with identical observed characteristics is found to have an l shaped distribution for the majority of the sample suggesting that many women have a very low probability of returning

does more mean less the male female wage gap and the proportion of females at the establishment level we examine the theoretical empirical and public policy implications of the pro portion of females in the establishment arrow s model of heterogeneous employer discrim ination provides predictions that are tested empirical results indicate support for the theory using establishment data but a contradiction is obtained with the individual data it is es timated that the proportion of females in the establishment accounts for 26 per cent of the gender log wage gap implications for employment equity are considered in the context of a new method of decomposing the log wage gap and indicate that such public policy can reduce this gap by 20 per cent jel classification j71 and j78

imperfect information and labor market bias against small and medium sized enterprises a korean case we examine the labor market s bias against small and medium sized enterprises focusing on the seoul digital industrial complex case we adopt heckman s approach to control selection bias and use primary data from questionnaire surveys conducted at both firm and employee levels we find that conventional firm specific factors such as wages fringe benefits and weekly work hours primarily explain the labor market bias but imperfect information is also positively associated with the bias for example a firm s inadequate ability to identify a pool of potential employee candidates or to provide them comprehensive firm or job specific information tends to worsen labor shortages and an employee s ex ante incomplete knowledge of on the job training or education opportunities tends to increase ex post turnover intentions our results suggest that reducing the market bias requires improving imperfect information as well as conventional firm specific conditions

work characteristics firm size and wages a positive wage firm size relationship is well documented in the empirical literature in industrial organization and labor economics firm size seems to proxy various unobserved determinants such as job satisfaction monitoring costs more complex technologies and worker participation in monopoly profits it is generally argued that the greater the possibility of controlling for these latent factors the less likely that a significant size effect will appear this paper attempts to distinguish firm size from other wage determinants for a rich data source for west germany and demonstrates the persistence of the size premium

is bigger still better the decline of the wage premium at large firms author affiliation william e even evenwe muohio edudavid a macpherson david macpherson trinity edu acknowledgment we thank daniel becker christopher bollinger and barry hirsch for helpful comments 1 introductionlarge firms pay higher wages than small firms this fact was first documented nearly 100 years ago and has been confirmed by myriad studies since then considerable effort has been directed toward testing different theoretical explanations for the size premium these include the fact that larger firms employ a more skilled work force and provide them with more and better capital pay efficiency wages to deal with greater monitoring costs pay compensating differences for less pleasant working conditions or greater risk that results from the type of human capital that is acquired or share rents with workers because of union threats or monopoly profits while there has been extensive research attempting to determine the importance of these different explanations of the size premium a recent trend has gone unnoticed namely the firm size premium has fallen substantially over the past 20 years for example we show that workers in firms with over 500 workers earned 55 more than workers in firms with fewer than 25 workers in the early 1990s our most recent data indicate that the size premium dropped by 15 percentage points over the past 20 years we also show that the size premium fell much more rapidly among less educated workers for example among workers with less than a high school degree the size premium fell by 30 percentage points this study documents the trends in the size premium and explores some possible explanations for the trends section 2 provides an overview of the theoretical explanations and empirical evidence on the size premium in section 3 we discuss our data and review the evidence on trends in the size premium empirical analysis of the trends is provided in section 4 our main conclusions are as follows first the size premium dropped over the past 20 years for two primary reasons i the type of worker employed by large and small firms has become more similar over time and ii large and small firms have become more similar in terms of the ways in which they reward workers holding observed characteristics constant in addition while the size premium has diminished over time it remains quantitatively significant particularly among highly educated workers 2 backgroundoi and idson 1999 provide a wide ranging summary of the extant research on the size premium their review points out that the size premium was first documented nearly 100 years ago among female workers at textile firms their summary of empirical studies shows that the largest firms e g firms with 500 or more employees pay wages that are 30 50 higher than those of the smallest firms e g firms with fewer than 25 employees numerous theories for the size premium have been proposed and no single theory is capable of providing an empirical explanation for the entire size premium the more prominent theories for the size premium are based upon size related differences in monitoring costs capital technology working conditions monopoly power or union effects the monitoring costs explanation for the size premium first proposed by oi 1983 argues that greater monitoring costs at large firms cause them to hire more able workers to conserve on monitoring costs because larger firms hire more able workers wages increase with firm size in addition because of greater monitoring costs large firms may be more likely to pay efficiency wages or deferred pay to reduce monitoring problems and utilize higher capital labor ratios to conserve on the number of workers empirical evidence indicates that the greater use of advanced technology by large firms explains part of the size premium dunne and schmitz 1995 reilly 1995 tan and batra 1997 troske 1999 yu et al

examining the employer size wage premium in the manufacturing retail trade and service industries using employer employee matched data economists have long sought to understand why large employers pay higher wages than small employers despite decades of study and analysis researchers have been unsuccessful in fully accounting for the employersize wage premium one problem has been insufficient data most empirical efforts to examine the size related wage premium rely on worker level data that contain little information about a worker s employer or firm level data that lack information on the characteristics of a firm s workforce although more recent attempts exploit newly developed employer employee matched data kevin t reilly 1995 troske 1999 most matched data sets cover only limited segments of the population thus raising doubt about the generality of the findings in this paper we use the recently created new worker establishment characteristics database nwecd to examine the employer size wage premium unlike other matched data sets the nwecd contains information on workers and employers in all sectors and regions of the econ

tenure unions and the relationship between employer size and wages the unionization rate in a worker s industry and the worker s tenure are interacted with employer size in wage regressions using current population survey data the results provide insight into the relatively small size wage relationship in the union sector nonunion tenure profiles steepen sharply with establishment size while union profiles flatten also the effect of industry unionization increases with firm size in the nonunion sector a pattern indicative of threat effects a separate analysis of nonunion wages indicates that size wage relationships are stronger in occupations associated with high monitoring costs

work power and earnings of women and men numerous studies have established that part of the very substantial male female earnings gap is explained by differences in the amount of human capital workers have accumulated see for example jacob mincer and haim ofek 1983 institutional factors have also been found to play a role in determining wages david gordon et al 1982 occupation further helped to explain the remaining gap but several researchers have shown that introducing dimensions of work authority by taking into account the individual s position in the work hierarchy explains more of the variation in earnings than does occupation martha hill 1980 last two recent studies ferber and spaeth 1984 spaeth 1985 also included control over monetary resources this variable added substantially to the explanatory power of earnings regressions even after human capital variables institutional factors and several other measures of work authority had been entered like the other studies ferber and spaeth also found that reward structures for men and women are quite different suggesting the possible existence of discrimination the question whether women may also be at a disadvantage in achieving control over monetary resources was not investigated when hill examined the process of achievement of work authority she found substantial differences between male and female workers in this paper we examine whether the same is true for attaining financial control i data and analysis

the role of supervisors in the determination of wages and wage gaps this article considers labour market discrimination by supervisors as a potential contributor to racial and gender wage gaps empirical analysis reveals evidence that all workers except hispanic males earn significantly higher hourly wages when working for a supervisor of the same race and sex as themselves furthermore the results suggest that sex has a larger impact on wages than race for workers with white supervisors while race has a larger impact on wages than sex for workers with minority supervisors based on past research we theorize that the degree of labour discrimination workers face may also be dependent upon the location and size of the firm in which they are employed however decomposing the samples by firm location and size suggests that these two factors cannot adequately explain the observed matched supervisor worker wage effects which supports the notion that these wage effects are largely driven by factors other than supervisor discrimination

worker heterogeneity job screening and firm size a model of job screening is developed in which firms make wage offers to workers based on an imperfect evaluation of their abilities if large firms have higher costs of acquiring information about workers they screen workers with less accuracy and choose a wage compensation scheme different from the one small firms choose this generates the often observed positive correlation between firm size and wages the model also predicts that wage structure and perhaps wage dispersion will differ by firm size and that individuals who acquire more schooling will also choose to work in a larger firm these hypotheses are tested and supported using data from the national longitudinal survey