MGHD28: Compensation

We use payroll data on over 1 million workers at 80,000 small firms to construct county-month measures of employment, hours, and wages that correct for dynamic changes in sample composition in response to business cycle fluctuations. We use this to estimate the response of small firms' employment, hours and wages following tighter local labor market conditions. We find that employment and hours per worker fall and wages rise. This is consistent with the predictions of the response to a demand shock in the well-known "jobs ladder" model of labor markets. To check this interpretation, we show our results hold when instrumenting for local demand using county-level Department of Defense contract spending. Correction for dynamic sample bias is important -- without it, the hours fall by only one third as much and wages increase by double.

In 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality" to describe the interdependent and overlapping systems of discrimination and disadvantage that result from the interconnected nature of social categorizations. These categories include, but are not limited to, disability, gender identity, nationality, race, and socioeconomic class. In recent years, we have witnessed increased societal interest in the notion of equal economic, political, and social rights. This has commonly manifested in a desire for equality of opportunity (i.e., social justice). This book applies an intersectional approach to examine a specific facet of inequality - namely, the presence and magnitude of wage discrimination in the U.S. labor market.  This book accomplishes several objectives. It introduces intersectional analysis for readers who are unfamiliar with the topic. The book identifies intersectional wage discrimination for a large number of worker groups that are defined by multiple intersecting identities (i.e., the personal characteristics of Hispanic ethnicity, nativity, race, and sex). It also documents variation in wage differentials both between worker groups (i.e., contemporaneously) and within groups (i.e., intertemporally). Finally, given the policy relevance of our topic, it is fitting that the final chapter is devoted to corresponding conclusions.

We examine the extent to which declining manufacturing employment may have contributed to increasing inequality in advanced economies. This contribution is typically small, except in the United States. We explore two possible explanations: the high initial manufacturing wage premium and the high level of income inequality. The manufacturing wage premium declined between the 1980s and the 2000s in the United States, but it does not explain the contemporaneous rise in inequality. Instead, high income inequality played a large role. This is because manufacturing job loss typically implies a move to the service sector, for which the worker is not skilled at first and accepts a low-skill wage. On average, the associated wage cut increases with the overall level of income inequality in the country, conditional on moving down in the wage distribution. Based on a stylized scenario, we calculate that the movement of workers to low-skill service sector jobs can account for about a quarter of the increase in inequality between the 1980s and the 2000s in the United States. Had the U.S. income distribution been more equal, only about one tenth of the actual increase in inequality could have been attributed to the loss of manufacturing jobs, according to our simulations.

The Routledge Companion to Reward Management provides a prestige reference work and a state-of-the-art compilation, mapping out contemporary developments and debates on rewarding people in employment, and how they relate to business, corporate governance and management. Reward management stands at the interdisciplinary interface between economics, industrial relations and HRM, industrial psychology and organizational sociology, and increasingly corporate governance incorporating debates around equity and fairness in and around the employment relationship and wider capital-labour relations. In recent years, trade union decline and widening differentials between those employed at the top of organizations have generated critical commentary in the popular media which can negatively impact on social cohesion. Theoretically underpinned but practically oriented, this Companion will synthesise these trends and controversies around issues while tracing conceptual and empirical provenance, currency and future prospects. It will be an invaluable resource for policy makers, practitioners, students and researchers in reward management, corporate governance, management and HRM seeking convenient access to an area which is highly complex and controversial in application.

Job evaluation is key to ensuring that employees are compensated fairly for their work. It is therefore essential that HR professionals have a robust process in place so that pay and reward are transparent and defensible within teams and across departments. Armstrong's Job Evaluation Handbook gives HR professionals all the tools they need to assess which approach to job evaluation is most suitable, how to implement it and how to maintain it. Packed with case studies from leading organizations such as Microsoft, Vodafone and the NHS, this guide will provide HR professionals with the ability to answer key questions such as how can we decide what is fair to pay our staff, how can we make sure that work of equal value receives equal pay and how can we make sure that our salaries remain competitive in the market? Armstrong's Job Evaluation Handbook covers everything needed to put effective job evaluation processes in place, including analytical matching and market pricing, developing job grades and defining pay structures. There is also coverage of the latest trends and issues in job evaluation, such as the decline in points-rated systems and the use of levelling by consultants. Underpinned by original research, this is a book that no HR department can afford to be without.