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The purpose of this paper is to estimate the influence of workplace teams on wages and wage dispersion within UK establishments.

Four types of workplace teams are analyzed using linked employer and employee data from the British Workplace Employee Relations Survey.

Workplace teams are positively associated with wages but negatively associated with wage dispersion within establishments. The four team variables examined have the same directional influence on both wages and dispersion suggesting that it is the use of teams that is important not necessarily the particular characteristics of teams that are being used. The role of occupation is also examined as teams may be more likely to form in certain occupations. The team results for both wages and wage dispersion are robust to the inclusion of detailed occupational information.

The influence of workplace teams is examined on both employee wages and wage dispersion within establishments. Additionally, the paper extends the previous empirical literature on teams by controlling for occupations at a fine level of detail not previously explored.

Personnel economics tends be based on single-firm case studies. Here, we examine several internal labor market dimensions of nearly 5,000 firms, over a period of 20 years, using detailed matched employer–employee data from Portugal. In the spirit of Baker, Gibbs, and Holmstrom (1994a, 1994b), we consider worker turnover, the role of job levels and human capital as wage determinants, wage dispersion within job levels, the importance of tenure in promotions and exits, and the scope for careers. We find a large degree of diversity in most of these personnel dimensions across firms. Moreover, some dimensions are shown to be robust predictors of firm performance, even after controlling for time-invariant firm heterogeneity and other variables. These dimensions include low worker churning, the importance of careers, low wage dispersion at low and intermediate job levels, and a tight relationship between human capital variables and wages.

Using an extensive data set on Finnish workers during the years 1990–2002, we analyze the relation between dispersion of wages within plants and labor productivity. We find a positive and significant relation between dispersion of wages within plant and average sales per worker. This relation is quadratic when dispersion is conditioned on workers’ observable characteristics. We also find positive and significant relation between unconditional dispersion of wages within plant and value added per hours worked, while we find a non-significant relation between conditional wage dispersion and valued added per hours worked. Results indicate that the incentive effect of wage dispersion dominates fairness or sabotage considerations.

This paper is an extension of Blinder's (1973) and Oaxaca's (1973) famous decomposition. While they looked at the determinants of the wage gap between two groups, this paper not only considers any number of groups but it also proposes a decomposition technique that permits to analyze the determinants of the overall wage dispersion. The approach presented combines two techniques. The first one, popular in the field of income inequality measurement, concerns the breakdown of inequality by population subgroups. The second one, very common in the labor economics literature, uses Mincerian earnings functions to derive a decomposition of wage differences between two groups into components measuring, respectively, group differences in the average values of the explanatory variables, in the coefficients of these variables in the earnings functions and in the unobservable characteristics. This methodological novelty allows one to determine the exact impact of each of these three elements on the overall wage dispersion, on the dispersion within and between groups, and on the degree of overlap between the wage distributions of the various groups.

This paper goes, however, beyond a static analysis in so far as it succeeds in breaking down the change over time in the overall wage dispersion and its components (between- and within-groups dispersion and group overlapping) into elements related to changes in the value of the explanatory variables and the coefficients of these variables in the earnings functions, in the unobservable characteristics and in the relative size of the various groups.

The empirical illustration of this paper looks at data obtained from income surveys conducted in Israel in 1982, 1990, and 1998, special emphasis being put on the comparison between the earnings of new immigrants and those of natives or older immigrants.

Previous studies focused predominantly on wage dispersion within men’ sports teams. This study aims to reveal how the relationship between wage dispersion and team performance applies for women’s sport.

The sample comprises 168 observations of four consecutive National Basketball Association (NBA) and Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) regular seasons (2018–2021). Eight econometric models are performed for comparing the leagues.

The findings indicate that the wage dispersion within the squads affects the women’s and men’s basketball teams differently. Cohesiveness theory is applicable for WNBA teams, while NBA teams follow the tournament theory.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper which inspects the relationship between wage dispersion and team performance using data from women’s sports. Further research may examine whether the differences found in sports also apply in different labor markets.

Existing research concerning the impact of unions on relative wages provides evidence for the existence of significant union/non‐union wage differentials. However, union practices are deemed to have a more pervasive effect on the overall distribution of wages, reducing wage differentials across and within establishments. Attempts to explore union effects on wage dispersion in the context of the Italian labour market. Several indicators of wage dispersion are computed, using both industry and establishment level data, in the attempt to ascertain the different routes through which union presence affects the structure of wages. The empirical evidence shows that Italian trade unions have pursued “egalitarian” objectives and have succeeded in shaping pay policies which, through central and local negotiations, raise low wages and reduce wage differentials both among skill categories and across establishments.

This paper analyses the relationship between wage dispersion and firm size within a “two-tier” system of collective bargaining (firm bargaining and multi-employer bargaining levels). Collective bargaining has a decisive role in setting wages in Spain, and its regulation highly limits the possibility for smaller firms to negotiate their own collective agreement.

Based on the Spanish Structure of Earnings Survey 2006, 2010 and 2014, the authors use variance decomposition in order to deeply analyse the effect of bargaining level on wage dispersion and compare the value of each decile of the distribution of wages for the purposes of identifying the quantitative differences in wage compression.

In general, the outcomes positively linked firm size and firm bargaining to wage dispersion. However, if firm size is taken into account, the effect of firm bargaining is limited among small firm workers because this type of firm is not usually covered by firm bargaining. On the other hand, the time analysis allows observing a wage compression that follows different patterns depending on firm size, compressing the higher part of the distribution in case of small firms and the lower part in case of large firms. This should be explained by the fact that wage negotiation is dependent on firm size.

Firm size has determined firm adjustment strategies to face the recent economic crisis and allows to evaluate the impact that changes in collective bargaining can have on wage distribution

There is no research that has tried to analyse the relationship between wage dispersion and firm size in a context where collective bargaining is essential to understand the wage structure. Normally, firm size plays a decisive role in wage policy given that the capacity of a company to negotiate an agreement is closely linked to its size.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the net relationship between internal wage dispersion and firm performance.

An empirical investigation of the relationship between internal wage dispersion and firm performance is performed using linked employer‐employee data for Norwegian firms from 1986 to 1997.

Contrary to findings in previous empirical work of a positive relationship between internal wage dispersion and firm performance, the analysis finds no such evidence in Norwegian firms, even though internal wage dispersion has increased.

The paper contributes to the relatively sparse empirical literature on internal wage dispersion and firm performance. Further, the analysis provides a new econometric specification for estimating internal wage dispersion that explicitly takes into account the hierarchical organization of firms. In contrast with previous work, the analysis also distinguishes between dispersion in both the fixed and variable portions of wages.

In this paper, we review the literature on pay variation (e.g., pay dispersion, pay compression, pay range) in organizations. Pay variation research has increased markedly in the past two decades and much progress has been made in terms of understanding its consequences for individual, team, and organizational outcomes. Our review of this research exposes several levels-related assumptions that have limited theoretical and empirical progress. We isolate the issues that deserve attention, develop an illustrative multilevel model, and offer a number of testable propositions to guide future research on pay structures.