Wage and Productivity Dispersion in U.S. Manufacturing: The Role of Computer Investment

Timothy Dunne, John Haltiwanger and Lucia Smith Foster ()

No 7465, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: By exploiting establishment-level data, this paper sheds new light on the source of the changes in the structure of production, wages, and employment that have occurred over the last several decades. Based on theoretical work by Caselli (1999) and Kremer and Maskin (1996), we focus on investigating the following two related hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that the channel through which skill biased technical change works through the economy is via changes in the dispersion in wages and productivity across establishments. The second is that the increased dispersion in wages and productivity across establishments is linked to differential rates of technological adoption across establishments. Our findings are supportive of these hypotheses. Specifically, we find that (1) the between plant component of wage dispersion is a growing part of total wage dispersion, (2) much of the between plant increase in dispersion is within industries, (3) the between plant measures of wage and productivity dispersion have increased substantially over the last few decades, and (4) a substantial fraction of the rising dispersion in wages and productivity is accounted for by increasing wage and productivity differentials across high and low computer investment per worker plants and high and low capital intensity plants.

JEL-codes: J3 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-his, nep-ino and nep-lab
Date: 2000-01
Note: EFG PR
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7465.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html.

Related works:
Working Paper: Wage and Productivity Dispersion in U.S. Manufacturing: The Role of Computer Investment (2002)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:7465

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w7465
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc
Address: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by ().