Measuring Productivity Differences in Equilibrium Search Models

This paper studies estimation of the number and location of modes of the wage distribution. The location of the modes can be used to estimate the cutpoints of the equilibrium wage distribution (Bowlus, Kiefer, and Neumann, 1995) in the presence of measurement error. These cutpoints can be used to classify workers into productivity classes; Company wage data can be used to examine how well the classification method works. We illustrate its use with wage and employment data from the Danish IDA data, a longitudinal dataset containing information about all workers in a 5% sample of firms from 1980-1991.