How much of a worker's wage growth is due to learning from their coworkers, versus learning from their firm? Does their trajectory of wages change if their firm fires some of their colleagues? How do these effects interact with the productivity, size, and other characteristics of the firm that employs them? The first part of this project is empirical. We document key facts about worker wage growth and how it relates to their firm's productivity and the composition of their co-workers. The second part is quantitative: our empirical estimates depend crucially on which workers firms choose to hire or fire in response to shocks. To make sense of our findings, we develop a model of multi-worker firms who manage heterogeneously skilled workers, and must account for the ways that workers learn from each other. We estimate our model using our empirical results.
Learning and wage growth within firms
Data provided through CASD (10)