Working Paper: NBER ID: w30441
Authors: Arindrajit Dube; Suresh Naidu; Adam D. Reich
Abstract: We measure workers’ preferences for wages and non-wage amenities at America’s largest employer, Walmart, using targeted survey experiments. We find that workers have an economically significant willingness to pay for “dignity at work". Consistent with the presence of monopsony power, we estimate hypothetical quit elasticities similar to recent estimates from the literature. We document significant complementarities between wages and non-wage amenities, suggesting that measures of monopsony that do not account for amenities may be biased. We find that workers at low dignity jobs have higher quit elasticities, but lower bargaining elasticities, relative to workers at high dignity jobs. Finally, we use cross-state variation in the bite of Walmart’s 2014 corporate minimum wage to estimate the effects of the minimum wage on both workplace dignity and other amenities. We find no evidence that non-wage amenities are reduced in response to a higher minimum wage, consistent with wage-amenity complementarity and labor market power.
Keywords: Monopsony; Labor Market Power; Wages; Non-Wage Amenities; Minimum Wage
JEL Codes: J0; J3; J42
Edges that are evidenced by causal inference methods are in orange, and the rest are in light blue.
| Cause | Effect |
|---|---|
| workplace dignity (J81) | wages (J31) |
| wages (J31) | quit elasticities (H30) |
| workplace dignity (J81) | quit elasticities (H30) |
| minimum wage (J38) | non-wage amenities (J32) |
| minimum wage (J38) | workplace dignity (J81) |
| minimum wage (J38) | job values (A13) |