• Medientyp: E-Book
  • Titel: Firms with Benefits? Nonwage Compensation and Implications for Firms and Labor Markets
  • Beteiligte: Ouimet, Paige [VerfasserIn]; Tate, Geoffrey [VerfasserIn]
  • Körperschaft: National Bureau of Economic Research
  • Erschienen: Cambridge, Mass: National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2023
  • Erschienen in: NBER working paper series ; no. w31463
  • Umfang: 1 Online-Ressource; illustrations (black and white)
  • Sprache: Englisch
  • Schlagwörter: Lohn ; Krankenversicherung ; Altersvorsorge ; Sozialplan ; Personalbeschaffung ; Kündigung ; USA ; Financing Policy; Financial Risk and Risk Management; Capital and Ownership Structure; Value of Firms; Goodwill ; Labor Economics: General ; Labor Demand ; Nonwage Labor Costs and Benefits; Retirement Plans; Private Pensions ; Turnover; Vacancies; Layoffs ; Arbeitspapier ; Graue Literatur
  • Reproduktionsnotiz: Hardcopy version available to institutional subscribers
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  • Beschreibung: Using administrative data on health insurance, retirement, and leave benefits, we find within-firm variation accounts for a dramatically lower percentage of total variation in benefits than in wages. We also document sharply higher between-firm variation in nonwage benefits than in wages. We argue that this pattern can be a consequence of nondiscrimination regulations, fairness concerns, and the high administrative burden of managing too many or complex plans. Consistent with this mechanism, we show that the presence of high-wage workers in unrelated divisions of a firm as well as workers hired in high-benefit local labor markets positively predicts their colleagues' benefits, controlling for occupation, wages, state, and industry. We find that the resulting high benefits reduce turnover, particularly among low-wage workers, for whom the benefits comprise a larger percentage of total compensation. Moreover, firms with more generous benefits attract and retain more high-wage workers, but also reduce their reliance on low-wage workers more than low-benefit peers. Our results suggest that benefits disproportionately matter for worker-firm matching and, hence, compensation inequality