Workers Are More Productive in Large Firms

摘要

Wages are positively related to firm size. This relation was discovered by henry L. Moore (1911) and later confirmed by, among Others, Charles Brown and James Medoff (1989). The wage premium associated with working at a larger firm or plant is ubiquitous, but its magnitude varies across countries and over time. The reason for a size-related wage premium is harder to pin down. Paying super- normal wages to deter shirking, thereby saving monitoring costs, seems plausible, but a closer examination has led us to reject this explana- tion (Oi and Idson, 1999).