High wage workers and high wage peers

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. This paper investigates the effect of co-worker characteristics on wages, measured by the average person effect of coworkers in a wage regression. The effect of interest is identified from within-firm changes in workforce composition, controlling for person effects, firm effects, and sector-specific time trends. My estimates are based on a linked employer employee dataset for the population of workers and firms of the Italian region of Veneto for years [1982][1983][1984][1985][1986][1987][1988][1989][1990][1991][1992][1993][1994][1995][1996][1997][1998][1999][2000][2001]. I find that a 10 percent increase in the average labour market value of co-workers' skills is associated with a 3.6 percent wage premium. I also find that around one fourth of the wage variation previously explained by unobserved firm heterogeneity is actually due to variation in co-worker skills, and that between 10 and 15 percent of the immigrant wage gap can be explained by differences in coworker characteristics. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayJEL Code: J31, J79.

Peer Effects in the Workplace

“….148 implies that a 10% increase in peer quality increases wages by 1.48%-an estimate roughly similar in magnitude to those reported by Lengerman (2002) and Battisti (2013) in a related specification. While this specification accounts for the possibility that workers employed in highwage firms work with better peers, it does not allow for firms which overpay specific occupations relative to the market to attract better workers into these occupations.…”

Peers and Motivation at Work: Evidence from a Firm Experiment in Malawi

“…A large literature provides compelling evidence that a worker's own performance depends on her peers and social interactions (Herbst and Mas 2015). Several studies show that worker effort is sensitive to the social pressure that arises when there are externalities from effort due to joint production and team compensation (Mas and Moretti 2009;Gould and Winter 2009;Bandiera, Barankay, and Rasul 2013;Babcock et al 2015;Arcidiacono, Kinsler, and Price 2016;Battisti 2017;Cornelissen, Dustmann, and Schonberg 2017;Jiang 2020;Amodio and Martinez-Carrasco 2018;Silver 2019). For example, Mas and Moretti (2009) find that retail workers in teams appear to engage in monitoring and free-riding behavior that affects productivity.…”

Are starting wages reduced by an insurance premium for preventing wage decline? Testing the prediction of Harris and Holmstrom (1982)

“…Just to rest any possible doubts we apply the solution proposed by Gormly and Matson (2011) and Battisti (2013) for the reflection effect. This is possible under the "proportionality" assumption made in Arcidiacono et al (2012) and Altonji et al (2015).…”