Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/51772 
Year of Publication: 
2011
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 5900
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
A rich but tractable variant of the Burdett-Mortensen model of wage setting behavior is formulated and a dynamic market equilibrium solution to the model is defined and characterized. In the model, firms cannot commit to wage contracts. Instead, the Markov perfect equilibrium to the wage setting game, characterized by Coles (2001), is assumed. In addition, firm recruiting decisions, firm entry and exit, and transitory firm productivity shocks are incorporated into the model. Given that the cost of recruiting workers is proportional to firm employment, we establish the existence of an equilibrium solution to the model in which wages are not contingent on firm size but more productive employers always pay higher wages. Although the state space, the distribution of workers over firms, is large in the general case, it reduces to a scalar that can be interpreted as the unemployment rate in the special case of homogenous firms. Furthermore, the equilibrium is unique. As the dimension of the state space is equal to the number of firms types in general, an (approximate) equilibrium is computable.
Subjects: 
wage dispersion
wage setting
rank-preserving equilibrium
JEL: 
D21
D49
E23
J42
J64
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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