摘要:
This dissertation examines the role of labor market frictions on wage dispersion and the business cycle properties of the labor market. The first chapter tries to explain the amount of frictional wage dispersion. Matching the magnitude of frictional wage dispersion has been difficult for most frictional search models of the labor market; only 1/3–1/4 of the frictional wage dispersion observed in the data can be accounted for using realistic calibrations. In this chapter, I develop a general equilibrium model with ex ante homogeneous workers but heterogeneous firm productivities that accounts much better for the magnitude of frictional wage dispersion. The key ingredient that makes this model different from wage posting models is the bargaining and the wage determination structure. When a firm meets an employed worker, the new firm and the incumbent firm engage in Bertrand competition in the worker's share of the match surplus; consequently the current wage of the worker depends not only on the firm's productivity, but also on the history of previous offers. I demonstrate that the latter generates about 3/4 of the frictional wage dispersion, and that standard wage posting models cannot achieve similar magnitudes of frictional wage dispersion with the calibration used in the chapter. In contrast to the structural estimation literature, the parametrization of the model is very parsimonious. The model is calibrated to match the worker flows, the standard deviation of log productivity and the replacement ratio, and it delivers frictional wage dispersion that matches the data very closely. In the second chapter, I go one step further and attempt to get closer to the source of the firms' productivity dispersion by introducing embodied technological growth, which generates an endogenous productivity distribution among firms. I show that this model also generates large wage dispersion. Comparative statics indicate that wage dispersion is increasing in embodied technological