Hartmut Egger

New Model of Intra-firm Labour Organisation

In his current research, Hartmut Egger extends previous work by shifting the focus from between-firm wage inequality to within-firm wage dispersion, which accounts for almost 50 percent of the wage dispersion observed in the data. More specifically, data on German producers suggests that the major part of inequality exists within firm-occupation cells and between workers that are similar in terms of their individual characteristics. Understanding this pattern requires a new model of intra-firm labour organisation that can explain why firms are willing to pay different wages to observably identical workers within the same occupation.

In a recent research paper, “Tasks, Occupations, and Wage Inequality in an Open Economy” (jointly with Sacha Becker, Michael Koch and Marc Muendler), Mr Egger has developed a theoretical model that can explain the empirically observed patterns of within firm-occupation wage inequality. During his research stay at the ifo Institute, Mr Egger plans to continue working on this project and to implement a structural estimation of key model parameters in order to quantify the effects of trade on the specific form on inequality considered in his research paper and to facilitate a counterfactual analysis that provides insights on whether the opening up of China has contributed to increasing wage inequality in Germany.

Hartmut Egger is a Professor of Economics at the University of Bayreuth. He is a research fellow of the CESifo Research Network, GEP Nottingham, IfW Kiel and an Associate Editor of the Review of International Economics. He has been awarded the Young Economist Award of the Austrian Economic Association and the Excellence Award in Global Economic Affairs of the Institute for World Economics in Kiel.