Knowledge that Transforms

We discuss the concept of “team human capital” and study the renegotiation of labor compensation after team members privately observe their own reservation wage. As labor productivity can only be high if the number of quits does not exceed a threshold, decisions concerning acceptance of individual wage demands become interdependent. When a team is made up of salaried workers, a peculiar case of efficiency wage results. Moreover, inefficient team dissolution may occur. We then show that inefficiency is less likely to occur when team members form a partnership.

This article studies the relationship between seniority and wages. Micro data with more than one observation from each firm are utilized to single out the seniority effect on wages arising within firms from the total seniority wage effect. The results show that the seniority effect arises within firms, but do not support the human capital explanation of the seniority wage profile. Employees with high levels of firm‐specific on‐the‐job training requirements have less steep wage profiles. The results give some support to the theory of delayed compensation as piece rate workers have negligible returns to seniority.

Ecuadorian labor costs are said to be high because of the existence of many mandated benefits. Using the 1994 Living Standards Measurement Survey, we show that the effect of these benefits is actually mitigated by a reduction of base earnings, that is, of the foundation on which they are paid. The reduction is larger in the private than in the public sector and is negligible for unionized workers. We also show that, in spite of mandated benefits, interindustry wage differentials are comparable to those of Bolivia, a country characterized by “flexible” labor markets but otherwise similar to Ecuador.

We estimate employer-specific wage, tenure, and wage growth differentials using a unique Bureau of Labor Statistics establishment survey of full-time, white-collar workers. Employer wage and tenure differentials, conditional on worker characteristics, are substantial in these data. Education, potential experience, and tenure are highly correlated within an establishment. High-wage establishments generally employ higher quality workers, and the most skilled men and professionals typically work with the most skilled women and nonprofessionals. There is significant variation in wage growth rates across employers, and high wage growth establishments tend to have longer tenure, all else equal.

During the last 25 years, annual hours worked by prime aged men fell by the equivalent of six 40-hour workweeks. The reduction was more pronounced among those younger than among mid-age workers, among black men than among white men, and among those with less schooling. Thus hours worked not only fell but showed increased dispersion, increases that paralleled the growth in wage dispersion that has become so familiar to students of trends in wages. The argument advanced here is that the correspondence is not coincidental; the changes in hours worked are simply the labor supply responses that follow the changes in the structure of wages.

I estimate a function that matches vacant jobs and unemployed workers to produce new hires. Israeli law requiring vacancy registration yields unique data quality. The literature underestimates matching function coefficients because of a simultaneity bias, as the outflow of hires depletes stocks of unemployed and vacancies. Instruments and a new simulation method address this bias. A new test reveals strong evidence of heterogeneity in unemployed and vacancies. Estimates imply labor market dynamics that absorb shocks completely within only 2 months. Reductions in the hire rate of referrals can explain a 2.1 percentage point increase in unemployment between 1978 and 1990.

Rapidly growing costs of elementary and secondary education are studied in the context of the rising value of women's time. The dramatic increase in direct costs of education per student in the past 3 decades is empirically linked to increasing demand and utilization of teacher and staff inputs, attributable to growing market opportunities for women and changes in the structure of families. On the supply side, the "flexibility option" that female teachers who take temporary leaves do not suffer subsequent wage loss upon reentry, is shown to be an important attraction of the teaching profession to women.

In this work I enquire into the empirical validity and some implications of Yoram Ben-Porath's insights. Section II answers the question, Are the shapes and magnitudes of growth in wage profiles largely attributable to human capital investments? Section III tests the proposition that over the working age capacity wages decline before observed wages do. Implied timing of labor supply provides the test. In Section IV implications are drawn from Ben-Porath's model for interpersonal differences and for the correlation between schooling and training.

We investigate the effects of wage compression through centralized collective bargaining when growth depends on the continual reallocation of labor from older, less productive plants to new, more productive plants. We first study the compression of wage differentials that derive from decentralized bargaining in heterogeneous plants. We then consider wage compression when wage difterentials arise from competition among employers over workers of differing quality. We show that wage compression through centralized bargaining can result in higher profits and greater entry of new plants than either decentralized bargaining or a competitive labor market.