TY  - JOUR
AU  - Gibbons,Robert
AU  - Waldman,Michael
TI  - A Theory of Wage and Promotion Dynamics in Internal Labor Markets
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 6454
PY  - 1998
Y2  - March 1998
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6454
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6454.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Robert S. Gibbons
MIT Sloan School of Management
100 Main Street, E62-524
Cambridge, MA  02142
Tel: 617/253-0283
Fax: 617/253-2660
E-Mail: rgibbons@mit.edu

Michael Waldman
Johnson Graduate School of Management
323 Sage Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY  14853-6201
Tel: (607) 255-8631
Fax: (607) 254-4590
E-Mail: mw46@cornell.edu
AB  - We attempt to explain employment practices in internal labor markets using models that combine job assignment, on-the-job human-capital acquisition, and learning.  We show that a framework that integrates these familiar ideas captures a number of recent empirical findings concerning wage and promotion dynamics in internal labor markets, including the following. First, real wage decreases are a minority of the observations, but are not rare, while demotions are very rare.  Second, there is significant serial correlation in wage increases.  Third, promotions are associated with particularly large wage increases, but these wage increases are small relative to the difference between average wages across levels of a job ladder.  Fourth, on average, workers who receive large wage increases early in their stay at one level of a job ladder are promoted more quickly to the next level.  Fifth, individuals promoted from one level of a job ladder to the next come disproportionately, but not exclusively, from the top of the lower job's wage distribution (and arrive disproportionately, but not exclusively, at the bottom of the higher job's wage distribution).
ER  -