The RFBerlin Applied Economics Seminar series brings leading researchers to Berlin to share their latest work and engage with our community. We are pleased to welcome Attila Lindner (UCL) for this session, where he will share his research.
Attila Lindner, Assistant Professor at the University College London. His main research fields are labour economics, public finance and psychology and economics, with a special focus on minimum wage, job search, and pension systems.
Event Topic:
Labor Market Tightness, Wage Inequality and Workplace Amenities
Workplace-specific pay premiums and their dispersion increases with labor market tightness. We study the role of compensating wage differentials in explaining this relationship: as competition for workers intensifies, firms are compelled to pay higher compensation for poor job attributes. We directly measure job attributes by estimating workplace-specific injury rates using a model with additive worker and firm effects. We find that while workplace-specific injury rates remain largely unaffected by labor market tightness, firm-specific wage premium paid in compensation for hazardous working conditions does respond: a 10 percentage points decrease in the unemployment rate leads to 2.2 percent higher wages at high-risk firms. The additional compensation for workplace-specific injuries accounts for around 7 percent of the increase in wage dispersion. Interestingly, despite offering higher wages, firms with poor amenities struggle to retain workers as market tightness increases. We interpret these findings through the lens of a model of imperfect competition, in which firms offer lower compensating differentials when labor market slackness reduces workers’ outside opportunities. Our results underscore how labor market tightness can amplify compensating wage differentials, contributing to increased wage inequality.
Event Details:
Date: 27 May 2025
Time: 13:00–14:45
Participation: the seminar is open to the public and targeted to an academic audience.
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