Evidence On The Employer Size-Wage Premium From Worker-Establishment Matched Data

Kenneth Troske

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 1999, vol. 81, issue 1, 15-26

Abstract: In spite of the large and growing importance of the employer size-wage premium, previous attempts to account for this premium using observable worker or employer characteristics have had limited success. The problem is that, while most theoretical explanations for the size-wage premium are based on the matching of employers and employees, previous empirical work has relied on either worker surveys with little information about the employer, or establishment surveys with little information about the workers. In contrast, this study uses the newly created Worker-Establishment Characteristic Database, which contains linked employer-employee data for a large sample of U.S. manufacturing workers and establishments, to examine seven explanations for the employer size-wage premium. A number of the explanations can account for some of the observed cross-sectional variation in worker wages. However, none of the explanations can fully account for the employer size-wage premium. In the end there remains a large, significant, and unexplained premium paid to workers of large employers. © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Date: 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (178)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/003465399557950 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Evidence on the Employer Size-Wage Premium From Worker-Establishment Matched Data (1998)
Working Paper: Evidence on the Employer Size-Wage Premium From Worker-Establishment Matched Data (1994)
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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:restat:v:81:y:1999:i:1:p:15-26

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().