Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/36367 
Year of Publication: 
2009
Series/Report no.: 
IZA Discussion Papers No. 4309
Publisher: 
Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), Bonn
Abstract: 
We study a competitive labor market with imperfect information. In our basic model, the labor market consists of heterogeneous workers and ex ante identical firms who have only imperfect private information about workers' productivities. Firms compete by posting wages in order to cherry-pick more productive workers from the applicant pool. The model predicts many important empirical regularities, including non-degenerated firm size distribution, persistent wage dispersion, and employer size-wage premium. We also consider extensions of the model where firms differ in either productivity or information about worker types, both generating assortative matching with a positive but imperfect correlation of worker and firm types. The main insight of this paper is that identical workers can get different wages depending on productivities of their coworkers in a competitive market with informational frictions. Our model also sheds light on inter-industry wage differential and sorting between industry and worker characteristics.
Subjects: 
Imperfect information
cherry-picking
wage dispersion
size-wage premium
inter-industry wage differential
JEL: 
D83
J31
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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