Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry: 1909-2006

Fascinating paper by Thomas Philippon (New York University) and Ariell Reshef
(University of Virginia) on wages, skills and technology in the U.S. financial sector over the last 100 years.

Abstract
We use detailed information about wages, education and occupations to shed light on
the evolution of the U.S. financial sector over the past century. We uncover a set of
new, interrelated stylized facts: financial jobs were relatively skill intensive, complex, and highly paid until the 1930s and after the 1980s, but not in the interim period. We investigate the determinants of this evolution and find that financial deregulation and corporate activities linked to IPOs and credit risk increase the demand for skills in financial jobs. Computers and information technology play a more limited role. Our analysis also shows that wages in finance were excessively high around 1930 and from the mid 1990s until 2006. For the recent period we estimate that rents accounted for 30% to 50% of the wage differential between the financial sector and the rest of the private sector.

It pays not to know your colleagues' pay

People like you get on my nerves. That is, if you are paid more than I am. And if we work together. Apart from that you're fine. This is on the basis of this recent NBER paper which looks at how work satisfaction is diminished when people find out how much more their colleagues are paid. Knowing how much less some colleagues are paid on the other hand doesn't matter. So there is envy but no smugness. That's something I suppose. Sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Inequality at Work: The Effect of Peer Salaries on Job Satisfaction
David Card, Alexandre Mas, Enrico Moretti, Emmanuel Saez

Economists have long speculated that individuals care about both their absolute income and their income relative to others. We use a simple theoretical framework and a randomized manipulation of access to information on peers' wages to provide new evidence on the effects of relative pay on individual utility. A randomly chosen subset of employees of the University of California was informed about a new website listing the pay of all University employees. All employees were then surveyed about their job satisfaction and job search intentions. Our information treatment doubles the fraction of employees using the website, with the vast majority of new users accessing data on the pay of colleagues in their own department. We find an asymmetric response to the information treatment: workers with salaries below the median for their pay unit and occupation report lower pay and job satisfaction, while those earning above the median report no higher satisfaction. Likewise, below-median earners report a significant increase in the likelihood of looking for a new job, while above-median earners are unaffected. Our findings indicate that utility depends directly on relative pay comparisons, and that this relationship is non-linear.