Basic Wages and Firm Characteristics: Rent Sharing in French Manufacturing

This paper shows that firm profits (and losses), and value added, are strongly related to individual hourly basic wages for most employees, as well as to the total earnings measures used previously but correlated with working time. Capital intensity is independently important without reducing the significance of profits, as in other studies. Value added avoids the negative bias implicit in accounting profits, and has a much larger effect on basic wages and earnings in the presence of numerous individual and firm controls. Copyright 2004 CEIS, Fondazione Giacomo Brodolini and Blackwell Publishing Ltd.