Research / BFI Working PaperNov 09, 2022

National Wage Setting

Jonathon Hazell, Christina Patterson, Heather Sarsons, Bledi Taska

How do firms set wages across space? Using job-level vacancy data and a survey of HR managers, we show that 40-50% of a job’s posted wages are identical across locations within a firm. Moreover, nominal posted wages within the firm vary relatively little with local prices, a pattern we verify with other measures of job level wages. Using the co-movement of wage growth across establishments, we argue these patterns reflect national wage setting—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.

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