Doctoral Dissertation Research: Pay-Setting for New Hires

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates the effects of salary history bans on firm practices and investigates cultural understandings about pay. Some recent legislation has enacted salary history bans, that is, has outlawed the practice of basing the salary offered a job candidate on the candidate's past salary. Using interviews, ethnography, and survey experiments, this project will document how firm practices may have altered due to such bans and will elaborate more generally how pay is perceived and understood. Results will identify how firm-level practices may interact with widely shared cultural ideas to reproduce or diminish pay differences following this policy change. These findings will contribute to stakeholder and public understanding of important economic patterns and how they may be ameliorated. This research uses multiple methods, including interviews with 60 experts and practitioners, ethnographic observation inside organizations, and a survey experiment. The interviews will provide insight into firm-level practices, how these practices may be changing in response to the salary history ban, and shared understandings about pay across industries and occupations. Ethnographic observation inside organizations will validate self-reports against practices in the field and will document variations across roles within a given firm. The survey experiment will be used to test hypotheses derived from fieldwork regarding perceptions of job candidates and starting pay. By employing multiple methods to gain insight into pay-setting, this research will contribute to the literature on pay differences and, more broadly, the cultural ideas that underpin market relations. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.