Maiores empresas = maior desigualdade?

The bigger, the less fair (Free Exchange - The Economist), via Tyler Cowen:

The benefits of size are thus enjoyed only by the most senior workers at a firm, who can extract a bigger premium for their skills and experience. A cleaner at a single shop does the same sort of work as those at a large chain. But managing a multinational firm such as Walmart requires a different—and much rarer—set of skills than that required to run a corner store. Over time this pushes up the salaries of the top brass at Walmart compared with corner-shop managers.

The authors find that the relationship between the growth in the size of companies and the level of inequality holds across the rich world. They looked at data from 1981 to 2010 on wages and the size of largest firms for 15 countries in the OECD, a club mostly of rich countries. The relationship between rising levels of income inequality and the size of firms was strong.

This effect is particularly noticeable in America and Britain, where firms have grown rapidly in recent decades. In America, for instance, the number of workers employed by the country’s 100 biggest firms rose by 53% between 1986 and 2010; in Britain the equivalent figure is 43.5%. On the other hand, in places where the size of firms has not changed much, such as Sweden, or where it has shrunk, such as Denmark, wage inequality has grown much less. Part of what is perceived as a global trend towards greater disparity in wages may actually be the result of the biggest firms employing a greater share of workers.

Wage Inequality and Firm Growth [pdf], por Holger Mueller, Elena Simintzi e Paige Ouimet (o estudo que serve de base ao artigo acima):

We examine how within-firm skill premia–wage differentials associated with jobs involving different skill requirements–vary both across firms and over time. Our firm-level results mirror patterns found in aggregate wage trends, except that we find them with regard to increases in firm size. In particular, we find that wage differentials between high- and either medium- or low-skill jobs increase with firm size, while those between medium- and low-skill jobs are either invariant to firm size or, if anything, slightly decreasing. We find the same pattern within firms over time, suggesting that rising wage inequality–even nuanced patterns, such as divergent trends in upper- and lower-tail inequality–may be related to firm growth. We explore two possible channels: i) wages associated with “routine” job tasks are relatively lower in larger firms due to a higher degree of automation in these firms, and ii) larger firms pay relatively lower entry-level managerial wages in return for providing better career opportunities. Lastly, we document a strong and positive relation between within-country variation in firm growth and rising wage inequality for a broad set of developed countries. In fact, our results suggest that part of what may be perceived as a global trend toward more wage inequality may be driven by an increase in employment by the largest firms in the economy.

E recordo o que escrevi em A empresa como uma economia de direção central: "sendo o capitalismo uma combinação de ilhas de economia planificada (as empresas) num mar de economia de mercado, muitos dos chamados "males do capitalismo" talvez derivem mais da parte planificada do que da parte mercantil."