中文摘要
薪资信息的扩散对劳动力市场具有重要意义,例如工资歧视政策与集体谈判。人们普遍认为,获取薪资信息的渠道有限且不平等,但关于这些信息摩擦的来源,几乎没有直接证据。长期以来,社会科学家一直推测,围绕薪资的隐私规范(即"薪资禁忌")发挥着重要作用。我们基于在东南亚一家大型商业银行对755名员工开展的田野实验,为这一现象提供了独特证据。研究表明,该银行许多员工既不愿向同事透露自己的薪资,也不愿向同事询问薪资。当分享敏感程度较低的资历信息时,这些摩擦依然存在,只是幅度较小。我们还讨论了对薪酬透明度政策和性别工资差距的启示。
Abstract
The diffusion of salary information has implications for labor markets, such as wage discrimination policies and collective bargaining. Access to salary information is believed to be limited and unequal, but there is little direct evidence on the sources of these information frictions. Social scientists have long conjectured that privacy norms around salary (i.e., the “salary taboo”) play an important role. We provide unique evidence of this phenomenon based on a field experiment with 755 employees at a large commercial bank in Southeast Asia. We show that many of its employees are both unwilling to reveal their salaries to coworkers and reluctant to ask coworkers about their salaries. These frictions persist, in smaller magnitude, when sharing less sensitive information on seniority. We discuss implications for pay transparency policies and the gender wage gap.