Owner Culture and Pay Inequality within Firms

Abstract

We study the role of national culture in explaining within-firm pay inequality in closely-held firms owned by immigrants using a unique employee-employer matched dataset linked with firm ownership and immigrant records in Canada over the 2001 – 2017 period. We find that culture that immigrant owners carry from their home countries is an economically significant determinant of pay inequality within their firms. We show that Hofstede’s individualism is a key cultural dimension affecting within-firm pay inequality: firms owned by individuals from more individualistic countries have larger pay inequality. We show that the impact of culture on within-firm pay inequality is causal. In a difference-in-differences setting using firms that undergo ownership changes, we find a significant increase in within-firm pay inequality after the firm was taken over by immigrant owners from a country with higher within-firm pay inequality or from a more individualistic country. We find similar results among employee stayers; among employee stayers in firms within a labor-intensive industry where production technology is comparable; when the owner changes were caused by deaths of prior owners. Overall, our findings suggest that informal institutions such as national culture are important determinants of income inequality.

Keywords: national culture, pay inequality, individualism, immigration

JEL Classification: J31, J15, Z10