A Test of Competitive Labor Market Theory: The Wage Structure among Care Assistants in the South of England
研究了英格兰南部养老院护理助理的工资结构，发现其偏离竞争性市场预期，表现为企业内工资差异小、企业间差异大，且与工人生产力特征关联弱。
This paper examines the structure of wages in a very specific labor market: care assistants in residential homes for the elderly on England's "sunshine coast."This sector corresponds closely to economists' notion of what should be a competitive labor market, both because it has a large number of small firms undertaking a very homogeneous activity in a concentrated geographical area, and because the workers are neither unionized nor covered by any minimum wage legislation, so that there are effectively no external constraints on the wage-setting process.The authors find that the wage structure deviates in important respects from what would be expected in a competitive labor market.In particular, wage dispersion is small within firms, but large between firms; and the wage dispersion that is present does not seem to be closely related to workers' productivity-related characteristics.A test rejects the hypothesis that unobserved labor quality can explain these findings.