Alternative Models of Wage Dispersion

Download or read book Alternative Models of Wage Dispersion written by International Monetary Fund and published by INTERNATIONAL MONETARY FUND. This book was released on 2005-03-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We analyze labor market models where the law of one price does not hold-that is, models with equilibrium wage dispersion. We begin by assuming workers are ex ante heterogeneous, and highlight a flaw with this approach: if search is costly, the market shuts down. We then assume workers are homogeneous, but matches are ex post heterogeneous. This model is robust to search costs, and it delivers equilibrium wage dispersion. However, we prove the law of two prices holds: generically, we cannot get more than two wages. We explore several other models, including one combining ex ante and ex post heterogeneity, which is robust and can deliver more than two-point wage distributions.