Group Learning, Wage Dispersion and Non‐stationary Offers
研究了在群体学习和非平稳报价条件下，相同个体因均衡信念差异导致工资不平等的可能性，并提出了一个统计量来检验非平稳性在数据中的存在。
Can differences in equilibrium beliefs among otherwise identical individuals account for a substantial degree of wage inequality? This paper shows that this is possible if two conditions are met. First, people learn about the distribution of wage offers from the experience of their peers, and second, people believe that wage offers are stationary even though offers that arrive later tend to have higher wages than offers that arrive earlier. Peer groups can then end up with different stable beliefs that lead to intergroup wage differences. The non‐stationarity of offers is rationalized in a model where firms can either advertise their job openings or not, and where advertised ones have more influence on more inexperienced job searchers. A statistic is proposed whose application to existing studies suggests that the non‐stationarity considered here is present in data.