Employer Size Effects in Russia

As early as 1911, Henry L. Moore documented that the wages of female textile workers in Italy were higher in larger establishments. In the last thirty years a large number of studies have demonstrated the presence of employer size-wage effects (at both the plant and firm level) in numerous different countries and across different time periods. This paper analyzes the labor market effects of employer size in Russia during the years 1994-98. Using the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, a four year nationally representative panel of the Russian population, I investigate the relationship between enterprise size and the characteristics of employees, wage levels and wage growth, on-the-job training, tenure and turnover. My findings indicate that employer size effects in Russia exhibit similar characteristics to those observed in the U.S. and a variety of other countries.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39684/3/wp300.pd

Employer Size Effects in Russia

As early as 1911, Henry L. Moore documented that the wages of female textile workers in Italy were higher in larger establishments. In the last thirty years a large number of studies have demonstrated the presence of employer size-wage effects (at both the plant and firm level) in numerous different countries and across different time periods. This paper analyzes the labor market effects of employer size in Russia during the years 1994-98. Using the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, a four year nationally representative panel of the Russian population, I investigate the relationship between enterprise size and the characteristics of employees, wage levels and wage growth, on-the-job training, tenure and turnover. My findings indicate that employer size effects in Russia exhibit similar characteristics to those observed in the U.S. and a variety of other countries.employer size, wages, wage growth, tenure, turnover

Team Production Effects on Earnings

The effects of team production on earnings is examined using the 1973 Quality of Employment Survey. I find that the earnings of nonunion workers are positively related to (1) team size, (2) the extent to which supervisors encourage team work, and (3) the helpfulness of members of the team. These results are robust to controls for establishment size, characteristics of the worker, and both industry and occupation

The Effects of Sectoral Decline on the Employment Relationship

This paper investigates tenure effects on employee retention under varying labor market condition. We develop simple models of the likelihood of employer default (through early dismissals) on delayed payment and specific human capital contracts, and the predicted tenure pattern in these defaults under adverse conditions. The empirical implications of the models are investigated using competing risks analyses of tenure effects on recall and new job acceptance applied to layoff unemployment spell data from Waves XV and XVI (1982-83) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. The results indicate that adverse conditions (sectoral employment decline and unemployment) significantly reduce the positive tenure effect on recall probabilities in the 1983 data. This result is consistent with firm default on delayed payment contracts, but may also reflect the effect of technological changes that lower the value of firm-specific investments

The Wage Arrears Crisis in Russia

In this paper, we propose an analytical framework suggesting that wage nonpayment in the Russian state sector and privatized factories, which resulted from acute cash flow problems in both, reflected an implicit contract among the government, managers and labor against worker layoff. We analyze the impact of wage nonpayment on workers grouped by demographic features, occupation and job location on the basis of a panel data set covering the years 1994 to 1996. Based on a multivariate specification that incorporates these features, we find that the frequency and amount of wage withholding increased sharply in 1996. While wages were denied less frequently and in lower amounts to low paid workers by age, occupation and location, this pattern(for which we find a correlation between the frequency of wage nonpayment and wage level at the regional level), needs to be confirmed with further statistical tests. While the practice of wage nonpayment tended to push families into poverty and increase their expectation of living in poverty in the immediate future, it also raised the likelihood of workers holding additional jobs and undertaking informal paid activity. At the same time, the frequency and magnitude of barter payments to workers in our sample were not sufficient to exercise a significant effect in mitigating the adverse effects of wage arrears

The Effect of Household Characteristics on Household-Specific Inflation Rates: An Application to Trends in Child Poverty and Educational Real Wage Differentials

This paper investigates the effect demographic-specific inflation rates on the measured well being of two population groups - families with and without children, and families with different educational attainment. Out major findings are (1) families with children generally experienced lower inflation rates between 1969 and 1985 than did families without children, yet calculated trends in child poverty are not significantly affected by the use of group specific price indexes, and (2) inflation rates decreased monotonically with the education of the household head throughout this period, so that real education wage differentials (calculated using education specific price indexes) widened more than nominal education wage differentials. This last finding indicates that the relative economic well being of the less educated has declined by a greater extent than would be inferred from trends in nominal education wage differentials

Executive Compensation and Agency Effects

The separation of ownership from control in large corporations can cause agency problems. This study analyzes the effects of the dispersion of corporate ownership on the compensation of the top executives of Fortune 500 companies. We estimate the effects across the executive hierarchy and for different components of the compensation package in contrast to more limited previous studies. The results indicate that there is a significant agency effect on executive pay, though the magnitude is small relative to company size. The effects are greatest for the most liquid form of remuneration, salaries, and are nonuniform across executive categories, with the strongest effect found for the chairman of the Board

Russia's Market Transition: Who Has Lost and How?

In this paper, we analyze a variety of labor market adjustment issues facing Russian households from 1992 to 1996 on the basis of a panel data set which allows us to group the sample respondents by demographic, occupational and job location features. We employ multivariate specifications for analyzing patterns of job security and job replacement concerns, involuntary layoffs and voluntary quits, forced unpaid leave and its duration, monthly hours of work and short-time, no employment spell and unemployment incidence as they affected our respondents selected by demographic characteristics, occupation, and region. Among our principal finding is that men and women had increased fears of job loss and increased pessimism about their reemployment prospects during the years considered here but women had borne a greater burden of the majority of the "quantity" or employment adjustments

To Pay or Not to Pay: Managerial Decision Making and Wage Withholding in Russia

In this paper we investigate the decisions of Russian managers in distributing wage nonpayment in Russia during the 1994-96 period. Using a longitudinal survey of households, we identify a pattern of wage arrears across regions and industries which suggests that managers allocated nonpayment among workers so as to minimize the real wage declines experienced by higher productivity workers. This finding suggests that post-Soviet managers were responding more strongly to market incentives than to equity considerations in their wage withholding allocation decisions

Firms' Main Market, Human Capital and Wages

Recent international trade literature emphasizes two features in characterizing the current patterns of trade: efficiency heterogeneity at the firm level and quality differentiation. This paper explores human capital and wage differences across firms in that context. We build a partial equilibrium model predicting that firms selling in more-remote markets employ higher human capital and pay higher wages to employees within each education group. The channel linking these variables is firms’ endogenous choice of quality. Predictions are tested using Spanish employer-employee matched data that classify firms according to four main destination markets: local, national, European Union, and rest of the World. Employees’ average education is increasing in the remoteness of firm’s main output market. Market–destination wage premia are large, increasing in the remoteness of the market, and increasing in individual education. These results suggest that increasing globalization may play a significant role in raising wage inequality within and across education groups