CRIEFF Discussion Paper Number 0203


Basic wages and firm characteristics:
Rent-sharing in French Manufacturing

Fathi Fakhfakh and Felix FitzRoy

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Abstract

    
This paper shows that firm profits (and losses) are strongly related to individual hourly basic wages for most employees, as well as to the total earnings measures that have been used previously but are correlated with working time. Capital intensity is independently important without reducing the significance of profits as in other studies. Our estimated basic wage-profit elasticity of one to two percent in the presence of numerous individual and firm controls is of similar magnitude to the female collective bargain premium and the firm size-wage effect, and these effects are much smaller than previous estimates without firm-specific controls.
    
 
JEL Classifications
J3

Fatih Fakhfakh 
Universite de Paris II

Felix FitzRoy
University of St Andrews


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