EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

What's My Employee Worth? The Effects of Salary Benchmarking

Zoe B. Cullen, Shengwu Li and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

No 30570, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Firms are allowed to use aggregate data on market salaries to set pay, a practice known as salary benchmarking. Using national payroll data, we study firms that gain access to a tool that reveals market benchmarks for each job title. Using a difference-indifferences design, we find that the benchmark information reduces salary dispersion by 25%. Thus, salary dispersion must stem partly from aggregate uncertainty about the salaries offered by other firms. Our model formalizes how salary dispersion can arise even in competitive labor markets for identical workers when such uncertainty exists, and we discuss implications for an ongoing policy debate.

JEL-codes: D83 J31 J38 M52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm and nep-lma
Note: LS PE
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30570.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:nbr:nberwo:30570

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w30570

Access Statistics for this paper

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

 
Page updated 2025-03-22
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:30570