Performance Pay and Wage Inequality
利用美国收入动态面板数据，发现绩效薪酬岗位的工资更紧密关联工人特征，且技能回报增长更快，这种机制解释了1970年代末至1990年代初男性工资方差增长的21%以及80百分位以上不平等的大部分增长。
An increasing fraction of jobs in the U.S. labor market explicitly pay workers for their performance using bonus pay, commissions, or piece-rate contracts. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we show that compensation in performance-pay jobs is more closely tied to both observed and unobserved productive characteristics of workers than compensation in non-performance-pay jobs. We also find that the return to these productive characteristics increased faster over time in performance-pay than in non-performance-pay jobs. We show that this finding is consistent with the view that underlying changes in returns to skill due, for instance, to technological change induce more firms to offer performance-pay contracts and result in more wage inequality among workers who are paid for performance. Thus, performance pay provides a channel through which underlying changes in returns to skill get translated into higher wage inequality. We conclude that this channel accounts for 21% of the growth in the variance of male wages between the late 1970s and the early 1990s and for most of the increase in wage inequality above the eightieth percentile over the same period.