工资信号、薪资历史禁令与平等

摘要

We develop a model of employee mobility and wage formation suitable for analyzing labor market interventions that target wages and discrimination. By augmenting the standard asymmetric learning model with costly effort, wages are necessary for production and fully informative of employee ability, rather than products of public signals and employer competition, as in prior models. With salary disclosure, strategies to mask employee quality, common in standard models, are untenable; instead, the equilibrium has symmetric learning, optimal assignment, and efficient production. Salary history bans—policy in many jurisdictions—revert to asymmetric learning, with strategic under-assignment to manipulate noisy signals. Equal pay mandates that restrict intra-title wage variation, as may result from anti-discrimination law, prevent firms from fully utilizing employee skill. In the presence of discrimination, both salary history bans and equal pay mandates may result in reduced wage gaps, though at the expense of reduced production efficiency and returns to skill.