BFI Student Lunch Series – National Wage Setting

Boxed lunches will be provided.

BFI’s Student Lunch Series invites prominent speakers to engage undergraduate and graduate students in discussions on economics. The talks highlight the practical use of economics for answering real-world questions pertinent to businesses and policy makers.

When large firms set wages across locations, economic theory suggests that those firms will set wages in line with local labor markets. However, more than 40% of a job’s posted wages are identical across locations within a firm, meaning that 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. Please join Christina Patterson, Chicago Booth associate professor, as she describes how national firms set wages in local labor markets, which are increasingly dominated by a small number of large firms. This issue raises important questions about wage inequality, the growth of labor market power, and the response of the economy to local shocks.

If you have any questions, please contact bfi-events@uchicago.edu.