期刊名称:DIW Diskussionspapiere / Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Berlin
出版年度:2007
卷号:2007
出版社:Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung, Berlin
摘要:The paper examines the labour quality explanation of the employer size-wage gap:
larger firms pay higher wages because they employ more skilled workers. Most
previous studies control for unobserved skills of workers using longitudinal
data and the fixed effects estimator thus relying on a questionable assumption
of time-invariant unobserved individual heterogeneity. This paper releases this
assumption by using a sample of workers who simultaneously hold two jobs; hence,
identification is achieved by differencing across two jobs held at the same time
rather than in different periods. A caveat of this approach is possible
heterogeneity of the two jobs; this issue is discussed in details in the paper.
Based on data from the UK Quarterly Labour Force Survey, this study finds little
support for the labour quality explanation: controlling for unobserved skills in
the sample of moonlighters does not reduce the estimate of the wage gap