We use matched employer-employee data from Sweden to study the role of the firm in affecting the stochastic properties of wages. Our model accounts for endogenous participation and mobility decisions. We find that firm-specific permanent productivity shocks transmit to individual wages, but the effect is mostly concentrated among the high-skilled workers; firm-specific temporary shocks mostly affect the low-skilled. The updates to worker-firm specific match effects over the life of a firm-worker relationship are small. Substantial growth in earnings variance over the life cycle for high-skilled workers is driven by firms accounting for 44% of cross-sectional variance by age 55.

A theoretical and empirical examination of wage differentials findsthat traditional theories of competition do not explain why workers with identical skills are paid differently.

We study a longitudinal sample of over one million French workers and over 500,000 employing firms. Real total annual compensation per worker is decomposed into components related to observable characteristics, worker heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity and residual variation. Except for the residual, all components may be correlated in an arbitrary fashion. At the level of the individual, we find that person-effects, especially those not related to observables like education, are the most important source of wage variation in France. Firm-effects, while important, are not as important as person-effects. At the level of firms, we find that enterprises that hire high-wage workers are more productive but not more profitable. They are also more capital and high-skilled employee intensive. Enterprises that pay higher wages, controlling for person-effects, are more productive and more profitable. They are also more capital intensive but are not more high-skilled labor intensive. We also find that person-effects explain 92% of inter-industry wage differentials.

We consider a general framework to study the evolution of wage and earnings residuals that incorporates features highlighted by two influential but distinct literatures in economics: (i) unobserved skills with changing non-linear pricing functions and (ii) idiosyncratic shocks with both permanent and transitory components. We first provide nonparametric identification conditions for the distribution of unobserved skills, all unobserved skill pricing functions, and (nearly) all distributions for both permanent and MA(q) transitory shocks. We then discuss identification and estimation using a moment-based approach, restricting unobserved skill pricing functions to be polynomials. Using data on log earnings for men ages 30-59 in the PSID, we estimate the evolution of unobserved skill pricing functions and the distributions of unobserved skills, transitory, and permanent shocks from 1970 to 2008. We highlight five main findings: (i) The returns to unobserved skill rose over the 1970s and early 1980s, fell over the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then remained quite stable through the end of our sample period. Since the mid-1990s, we observe some evidence of polarization: the returns to unobserved skill declined at the bottom of the distribution while they remained relatively constant over the top half. (ii) The variance of unobserved skill changed very little across most cohorts in our sample (those born between 1925 and 1955). (iii) The variance of transitory shocks jumped up considerably in the early 1980s but shows little long-run trend otherwise over the more than thirty year period we study. (iv) The variance of permanent shocks declined very slightly over the 1970s, then rose systematically through the end of our sample by 15 to 20 log points. The increase in this variance over the 1980s and 1990s was strongest for workers with low unobserved ability. (v) In most years, the distribution of unobserved skill pricing is positively skewed, while the distributions of permanent and (especially) transitory shocks are negatively skewed.

We document a large decrease in earnings inequality in Brazil between 1996 and 2012. Using administrative linked employer-employee data, we fit high-dimensional worker and firm fixed effects models to understand the sources of this decrease. Firm effects account for 40 percent of the total decrease and worker effects for 29 percent. Changes in observable worker and firm characteristics contributed little to these trends. Instead, the decrease is primarily due to a compression of returns to these characteristics, particularly a declining firm productivity pay premium. Our results shed light on potential drivers of earnings inequality dynamics.

This study predicts and finds that the interaction of firm-level and aggregate-level shocks explains a significant portion of shocks to macroeconomic activity. Specifically, we hypothesize that the relation between uncertainty and economic growth is most pronounced when both firm-level and aggregate level uncertainty are high simultaneously. Similarly, we hypothesize that aggregate performance affects unemployment most when both firm-level dispersion is high and aggregate performance is low, based on the sectoral shift theory. Our hypotheses and empirical results show that the interactive effect of firm-level and aggregate-level shocks are larger than the sum of the individual effects.

In The Economics of Consumption, Tullio Jappelli and Luigi Pistaferri provide a comprehensive examination of the most important developments in the field of consumption decisions and evaluate economic models against empirical evidence.