Wage Dispersion and Search Behavior

Robert Hall () and Andreas Mueller

No 9527, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We use a rich new body of data on the experiences of unemployed job-seekers to determine the sources of wage dispersion and to create a search model consistent with the acceptance decisions the job-seekers made. From the data and the model, we identify the distributions of four key variables: offered wages, offered non-wage job values, the value of the job-seeker's non-work alternative, and the job-seeker's personal productivity. We find that, conditional on personal productivity, the dispersion of offered wages is moderate, accounting for 21 percent of the total variation in observed offered wages, whereas the dispersion of the non-wage component of offered job values is substantially larger. We relate our findings to an influential recent paper by Hornstein, Krusell, and Violante who called attention to the tension between the fairly high dispersion of the values job-seekers assign to their job offers – which suggest a high value to sampling from multiple offers – and the fact that the job-seekers often accept the first offer they receive.

Keywords: wage dispersion; reservation wages; search frictions; unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J31 J32 J64 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 57 pages
Date: 2015-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Published - published in: Journal of Political Economy, 2018, 126 (4), 1594-1637

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9527.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Wage Dispersion and Search Behavior (2015)
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:iza:izadps:dp9527

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().