National Wage Setting
89 Pages Posted: 10 Nov 2022
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National Wage Setting
National Wage Setting
Date Written: November 9, 2022
Abstract
How do firms set wages across space? Using job-level vacancy data and a survey of HR managers, we show that 40-50% of a job’s posted wages are identical across locations within a firm. Moreover, nominal posted wages within the firm vary relatively little with local prices, a pattern we verify with other measures of job level wages. Using the co-movement of wage growth across establishments, we argue these patterns reflect national wage setting---a significant minority of firms choose to set the same nominal wage for a job across all their establishments, despite varying local labor market conditions.
JEL Classification: J3,J31
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation