Wages and Firm Performance: Evidence from the 2008 Financial Crisis
利用英国企业长期工资协议签订时间的差异，研究发现金融危机期间工资更高的企业反而实现了更高的劳动生产率，支持了机会成本差异促使员工更努力工作的直觉。
Abstract We examine the effect of higher wages on firm performance during the 2008 financial crisis. To identify variation in wages, we rely on heterogeneity in the timing of long-term wage agreements for a sample of U.K. firms. We instrument for firms signing long-term agreements overlapping with the crisis by the presence of a contract signed in 2006 or earlier and expiring before September 2008. Treated firms not only paid higher wages but also realized greater labor productivity relative to control firms. These findings are consistent with the intuition that opportunity cost differentials between treated and control firms induce employees to exert higher effort. Received February 28, 2019; editorial decision July 8, 2020 by Editor Andrew Ellul. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.