Rigedeces salariales en Chile: una aproximación al tratamiento de datos para analizar dinámicas salariales como resultados de la dinámica laboral

Abstract

Wages, seen as the price of labor in the labor market differ widely the pricing mechanism in a specific market of goods. Unlike the latter, wages are determined through complex interaction of mechanisms and institutions such as hiring procedures, unions, minimum wage policies, risk distribution and incomplete information. Market economies are extremely fluid and require constant reallocation of resources to their newest and most efficient uses. In this context firms continuously adjust their wages over the business cycle by hiring and firing workers according to their productive capacities and movement of workers available to the economy. The dynamic adjustment of wages in Chile show a stiffer behavior compared to developed economies, mainly by the high persistence and low variability of permanent shocks. The theoretical and empirical literature suggests significant productivity gains associated with the entry of firms with higher productivity levels than the incumbents, as well as the exit of those less productive. Evidence suggests that most of the job reallocation is associated with specific shocks on firms, rather than aggregates shocks effects, so that the high degree of heterogeneity of the firms within the economy largely explains the movement of workers in the labor market. To disaggregate wage dynamics through transitions between processes of creation, destruction and changes in staffing levels in firms and in movements of workers moving between states of employment, unemployment and inactivity, requires the use of employer-employee level data at high frequency to identify changes in each time period. The data available so far show the difficulty of not being able to draw direct conclusions from them about these movements. The focus of this work will be to understand how to treat this kind of information and preliminary results for further processing which contributes to future developments in the area and its potential exploitation as relevant information to understand the dynamics of wages derived from changes in the labor market.