The Impact of Hierarchies on Wages.

The failure of human capital theory to explain firm related effects on wages, new empirical approaches to internal labor markets, and new work on careers have all led to a recent surge in interest in how firm internal structure, and the jobs within firms, help determine wages. The least developped approach to this new area is the theory of hierarchies, which springs originally from industrial organization and the theory of the firm. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the theoretical and empirical importance of management hierarchies.