N Wilmers
Biographic Data
| ID | 29200 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Wilmers |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Wilmers |
| SIGNATURE | WILMERS N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0457-8761 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 145 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Politicization of Wage Setting
Political realignment in the United States has reshuffled party affiliations across occupational lines. The party of unions and minimum wages is increasingly also the party of managers and professionals. In this article, we investigate whether this realignment among the actors setting wages within firms has politicized wage setting. We first show that Democratic managers pay more to hourly workers than Republican managers do, even when we compare…
Declining Inequality and Persistent Inequality Structures
Prior research finds that rising labor market inequality in the United States was abetted by structural changes in the economy: a consolidation of occupation and organizational bases of advantage; rising within-job inequality; and declining pay and employment in middle-earning jobs. In this article, we revisit these structural changes by asking whether they have been reversed as labor market inequality fell over the last decade. Drawing on restri…
Book Reviewers for Volume 130
Earnings Effects of Direct Worker Voice in Production
When employers use input from workers, who benefits? Direct worker voice in production could boost productivity and strengthen the bargaining position of production workers. Or it could be a way that employers appropriate workers' knowledge and expertise, thereby weakening workers' position. Using a survey of 30,000 US manufacturing establishments matched to administrative records of worker earnings and business performance, the authors find that…
Firms and the Intergenerational Transmission of Labor Market Advantage
Between-Firm Inequality and Informal Social Relations
Employer investment, social closure, peer networks: substantial research highlights differences in informal social structure across workplaces. Yet studies of pay inequality between firms have largely neglected these differences in favor of more easily measurable features like firm size or ownership structure. We show how three types of workplace social relations shape firm pay setting: employer relational investment that supports higher wages, s…
Economic Outcomes of Strikers in an Era of Weak Unions
From 1970 to 2000, worker participation in strikes decreased by 90%. We show that strikers also experienced worse outcomes after 1981. Evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics suggests that strikers enjoyed 5%–10% wage gains before the 1980s but null wage changes thereafter. Additional analyses of other survey data and collective bargaining agreements reinforce the finding that strikes since the 1980s have not been associated with increas…
Management Divided: Contradictions of Labor Management
How Do Employer Practices Affect Economic Mobility
How can employers facilitate economic mobility for workers, particularly workers of color or those without a college degree? The authors integrate a fragmented literature to assess how employers' practices affect enhanced economic security and mobility. This article first identifies three pathways linking employers' practices to mobility: improving material job quality, increasing access to better jobs for historically marginalized workers, and p…
Frames or social structures? Comment on “Making sense of (mis)matched frames of reference: A dynamic cognitive theory of (in)stability in HR practices”
Do workers and employers hold strong views about the nature of the employment relationship? Are these views causally important for understanding the success or failure of human resources practices? In this article, I comment on Budd, Pohler and Huang’s project of bringing cognitive frames theory to employment relations research. I agree with their emphasis on informal workplace social dynamics and suggest further attention to the sources of cogni…
How Internal Hiring Affects Occupational Stratification
When employers conduct more internal hiring, does this facilitate upward mobility for low-paid workers or does it protect the already advantaged? To assess the effect of within-employer job mobility on occupational stratification, we develop a framework that accounts for inequality in both rates and payoffs of job changing. Internal hiring facilitates advancement for workers without strong credentials, but it excludes workers at employers with fe…
Values and Inequality: Prosocial Jobs and the College Wage Premium
Employers often recruit workers by invoking corporate social responsibility, organizational purpose, or other claims to a prosocial mission. In an era of substantial labor market inequality, commentators typically dismiss these claims as hypocritical: prosocial employers often turn out to be no more generous with low-wage workers than are other employers. In this article, we argue that prosocial commitments in fact inadvertently reduce earnings i…
Blacklist or Short List: Do Employers Discriminate against Union Supporter Job Applicants
Starting in the 1980s, US employers revived aggressive action against unions. Employers' public opposition to unions yielded a scholarly consensus that US employers actively and consistently discriminate against union supporters. However, evidence for widespread employer anti-union discrimination is based mainly on employer reactions to rare union organizing campaigns. To measure baseline or preventive anti-union discrimination, the authors field…
Consolidated Advantage: New Organizational Dynamics of Wage Inequality
The two main axes of inequality in the U.S. labor market-occupation and workplace-have increasingly consolidated. In 1999, the largest share of employment at high-paying workplaces was blue-collar production workers, but by 2017 it was managers and professionals. As such, workers benefiting from a high-paying workplace are increasingly those who already benefit from membership in a high-paying occupation. Drawing on occupation-by-workplace data, …
Tell the Bosses We're Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century
Job Turf or Variety: Task Structure as a Source of Organizational Inequality
What explains pay inequality among coworkers? Theories of organizational influence on inequality emphasize the effects of formal hierarchy. But restructuring, firm flattening, and individualized pay setting have challenged the relevance of these structuralist theories. I propose a new organizational theory of differences in pay, focused on task structure and the horizontal division of labor across jobs. When organizations specialize jobs, they re…
Fine, J., Burnham, L., Griffith, K., Ji, M., Narro, V., & Pitts, S. (2018). No One Size Fits All: Worker Organization, Policy, and Movement in a New Economic Age
Solidarity Within and Across Workplaces: How Cross-Workplace Coordination Affects Earnings Inequality
Nathan Wilmers a , Solidarity Within and Across Workplaces: How Cross-Workplace Coordination Affects Earnings Inequality, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 5, No. 4, Changing Job Quality: Causes, Consequences, and Challenges (September 2019), pp. 190-215
Do the Poor Pay More for Housing? Exploitation, Profit, and Risk in Rental Markets
This article examines tenant exploitation and landlord profit margins within residential rental markets. Defining exploitation as being overcharged relative to the market value of a property, the authors find exploitation of tenants to be highest in poor neighborhoods. Landlords in poor neighborhoods also extract higher profits from housing units. Property values and tax burdens are considerably lower in depressed residential areas, but rents are…
Wage Stagnation and Buyer Power: How Buyer-Supplier Relations Affect U.S. Workers’ Wages, 1978 to 2014
Since the 1970s, market restructuring has shifted many workers into workplaces heavily reliant on sales to outside corporate buyers. These outside buyers wield substantial power over working conditions among their suppliers. During the same period, wage growth for middle-income workers stagnated. By extending organizational theories of wage-setting to incorporate interactions between organizations, I predict that wage stagnation resulted in part …
Labor Unions as Activist Organizations: A Union Power Approach to Estimating Union Wage Effects
Amid the long decline of US unions, research on union wage effects has struggled with selection problems and inadequate theory. I draw on the sociology of labor to argue that unions use non-market sources of power to pressure companies into raising wages. This theory of union power implies a new test of union wage effects: does union activism have an effect on wages that is not reducible to workers’ market position? Two institutional determinants…
Does Consumer Demand Reproduce Inequality? High-Income Consumers, Vertical Differentiation, and the Wage Structure
This article considers the effects on the wage structure of the U.S. economy's growing reliance on demand from high-income consumers. Relative to the mass consumers that defined the post–World War II U.S. economy, high-income consumers are willing to pay for high-quality and high-status products. These spending patterns split producers into up-market and down-market segments and stoke winner-take-all dynamics among up-market producers. Economic d…
Do the Poor Pay More for Housing? Exploitation, Profit, and Risk in Rental Markets
This article examines tenant exploitation and landlord profit margins within residential rental markets. Defining exploitation as being overcharged relative to the market value of a property, the authors find exploitation of tenants to be highest in poor neighborhoods. Landlords in poor neighborhoods also extract higher profits from housing units. Property values and tax burdens are considerably lower in depressed residential areas, but rents are…
Wage Stagnation and Buyer Power: How Buyer-Supplier Relations Affect U.S. Workers’ Wages, 1978 to 2014
Since the 1970s, market restructuring has shifted many workers into workplaces heavily reliant on sales to outside corporate buyers. These outside buyers wield substantial power over working conditions among their suppliers. During the same period, wage growth for middle-income workers stagnated. By extending organizational theories of wage-setting to incorporate interactions between organizations, I predict that wage stagnation resulted in part …
Consolidated Advantage: New Organizational Dynamics of Wage Inequality
The two main axes of inequality in the U.S. labor market-occupation and workplace-have increasingly consolidated. In 1999, the largest share of employment at high-paying workplaces was blue-collar production workers, but by 2017 it was managers and professionals. As such, workers benefiting from a high-paying workplace are increasingly those who already benefit from membership in a high-paying occupation. Drawing on occupation-by-workplace data, …
Values and Inequality: Prosocial Jobs and the College Wage Premium
Employers often recruit workers by invoking corporate social responsibility, organizational purpose, or other claims to a prosocial mission. In an era of substantial labor market inequality, commentators typically dismiss these claims as hypocritical: prosocial employers often turn out to be no more generous with low-wage workers than are other employers. In this article, we argue that prosocial commitments in fact inadvertently reduce earnings i…
Solidarity Within and Across Workplaces: How Cross-Workplace Coordination Affects Earnings Inequality
Nathan Wilmers a , Solidarity Within and Across Workplaces: How Cross-Workplace Coordination Affects Earnings Inequality, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 5, No. 4, Changing Job Quality: Causes, Consequences, and Challenges (September 2019), pp. 190-215
Does Consumer Demand Reproduce Inequality? High-Income Consumers, Vertical Differentiation, and the Wage Structure
This article considers the effects on the wage structure of the U.S. economy's growing reliance on demand from high-income consumers. Relative to the mass consumers that defined the post–World War II U.S. economy, high-income consumers are willing to pay for high-quality and high-status products. These spending patterns split producers into up-market and down-market segments and stoke winner-take-all dynamics among up-market producers. Economic d…
Between-Firm Inequality and Informal Social Relations
Employer investment, social closure, peer networks: substantial research highlights differences in informal social structure across workplaces. Yet studies of pay inequality between firms have largely neglected these differences in favor of more easily measurable features like firm size or ownership structure. We show how three types of workplace social relations shape firm pay setting: employer relational investment that supports higher wages, s…
Firms and the Intergenerational Transmission of Labor Market Advantage
Tell the Bosses We're Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century
Labor Unions as Activist Organizations: A Union Power Approach to Estimating Union Wage Effects
Amid the long decline of US unions, research on union wage effects has struggled with selection problems and inadequate theory. I draw on the sociology of labor to argue that unions use non-market sources of power to pressure companies into raising wages. This theory of union power implies a new test of union wage effects: does union activism have an effect on wages that is not reducible to workers’ market position? Two institutional determinants…
Does Consumer Demand Reproduce Inequality? High-Income Consumers, Vertical Differentiation, and the Wage Structure
This article considers the effects on the wage structure of the U.S. economy's growing reliance on demand from high-income consumers. Relative to the mass consumers that defined the post–World War II U.S. economy, high-income consumers are willing to pay for high-quality and high-status products. These spending patterns split producers into up-market and down-market segments and stoke winner-take-all dynamics among up-market producers. Economic d…
Wage Stagnation and Buyer Power: How Buyer-Supplier Relations Affect U.S. Workers’ Wages, 1978 to 2014
Since the 1970s, market restructuring has shifted many workers into workplaces heavily reliant on sales to outside corporate buyers. These outside buyers wield substantial power over working conditions among their suppliers. During the same period, wage growth for middle-income workers stagnated. By extending organizational theories of wage-setting to incorporate interactions between organizations, I predict that wage stagnation resulted in part …
Solidarity Within and Across Workplaces: How Cross-Workplace Coordination Affects Earnings Inequality
Nathan Wilmers a , Solidarity Within and Across Workplaces: How Cross-Workplace Coordination Affects Earnings Inequality, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 5, No. 4, Changing Job Quality: Causes, Consequences, and Challenges (September 2019), pp. 190-215
Do the Poor Pay More for Housing? Exploitation, Profit, and Risk in Rental Markets
This article examines tenant exploitation and landlord profit margins within residential rental markets. Defining exploitation as being overcharged relative to the market value of a property, the authors find exploitation of tenants to be highest in poor neighborhoods. Landlords in poor neighborhoods also extract higher profits from housing units. Property values and tax burdens are considerably lower in depressed residential areas, but rents are…
Job Turf or Variety: Task Structure as a Source of Organizational Inequality
What explains pay inequality among coworkers? Theories of organizational influence on inequality emphasize the effects of formal hierarchy. But restructuring, firm flattening, and individualized pay setting have challenged the relevance of these structuralist theories. I propose a new organizational theory of differences in pay, focused on task structure and the horizontal division of labor across jobs. When organizations specialize jobs, they re…
Fine, J., Burnham, L., Griffith, K., Ji, M., Narro, V., & Pitts, S. (2018). No One Size Fits All: Worker Organization, Policy, and Movement in a New Economic Age
Consolidated Advantage: New Organizational Dynamics of Wage Inequality
The two main axes of inequality in the U.S. labor market-occupation and workplace-have increasingly consolidated. In 1999, the largest share of employment at high-paying workplaces was blue-collar production workers, but by 2017 it was managers and professionals. As such, workers benefiting from a high-paying workplace are increasingly those who already benefit from membership in a high-paying occupation. Drawing on occupation-by-workplace data, …
Tell the Bosses We're Coming: A New Action Plan for Workers in the Twenty-First Century
Frames or social structures? Comment on “Making sense of (mis)matched frames of reference: A dynamic cognitive theory of (in)stability in HR practices”
Do workers and employers hold strong views about the nature of the employment relationship? Are these views causally important for understanding the success or failure of human resources practices? In this article, I comment on Budd, Pohler and Huang’s project of bringing cognitive frames theory to employment relations research. I agree with their emphasis on informal workplace social dynamics and suggest further attention to the sources of cogni…
How Internal Hiring Affects Occupational Stratification
When employers conduct more internal hiring, does this facilitate upward mobility for low-paid workers or does it protect the already advantaged? To assess the effect of within-employer job mobility on occupational stratification, we develop a framework that accounts for inequality in both rates and payoffs of job changing. Internal hiring facilitates advancement for workers without strong credentials, but it excludes workers at employers with fe…
Values and Inequality: Prosocial Jobs and the College Wage Premium
Employers often recruit workers by invoking corporate social responsibility, organizational purpose, or other claims to a prosocial mission. In an era of substantial labor market inequality, commentators typically dismiss these claims as hypocritical: prosocial employers often turn out to be no more generous with low-wage workers than are other employers. In this article, we argue that prosocial commitments in fact inadvertently reduce earnings i…
Blacklist or Short List: Do Employers Discriminate against Union Supporter Job Applicants
Starting in the 1980s, US employers revived aggressive action against unions. Employers' public opposition to unions yielded a scholarly consensus that US employers actively and consistently discriminate against union supporters. However, evidence for widespread employer anti-union discrimination is based mainly on employer reactions to rare union organizing campaigns. To measure baseline or preventive anti-union discrimination, the authors field…
How Do Employer Practices Affect Economic Mobility
How can employers facilitate economic mobility for workers, particularly workers of color or those without a college degree? The authors integrate a fragmented literature to assess how employers' practices affect enhanced economic security and mobility. This article first identifies three pathways linking employers' practices to mobility: improving material job quality, increasing access to better jobs for historically marginalized workers, and p…
Economic Outcomes of Strikers in an Era of Weak Unions
From 1970 to 2000, worker participation in strikes decreased by 90%. We show that strikers also experienced worse outcomes after 1981. Evidence from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics suggests that strikers enjoyed 5%–10% wage gains before the 1980s but null wage changes thereafter. Additional analyses of other survey data and collective bargaining agreements reinforce the finding that strikes since the 1980s have not been associated with increas…
Management Divided: Contradictions of Labor Management
Book Reviewers for Volume 130
Earnings Effects of Direct Worker Voice in Production
When employers use input from workers, who benefits? Direct worker voice in production could boost productivity and strengthen the bargaining position of production workers. Or it could be a way that employers appropriate workers' knowledge and expertise, thereby weakening workers' position. Using a survey of 30,000 US manufacturing establishments matched to administrative records of worker earnings and business performance, the authors find that…
Firms and the Intergenerational Transmission of Labor Market Advantage
Between-Firm Inequality and Informal Social Relations
Employer investment, social closure, peer networks: substantial research highlights differences in informal social structure across workplaces. Yet studies of pay inequality between firms have largely neglected these differences in favor of more easily measurable features like firm size or ownership structure. We show how three types of workplace social relations shape firm pay setting: employer relational investment that supports higher wages, s…
The Politicization of Wage Setting
Political realignment in the United States has reshuffled party affiliations across occupational lines. The party of unions and minimum wages is increasingly also the party of managers and professionals. In this article, we investigate whether this realignment among the actors setting wages within firms has politicized wage setting. We first show that Democratic managers pay more to hourly workers than Republican managers do, even when we compare…
Declining Inequality and Persistent Inequality Structures
Prior research finds that rising labor market inequality in the United States was abetted by structural changes in the economy: a consolidation of occupation and organizational bases of advantage; rising within-job inequality; and declining pay and employment in middle-earning jobs. In this article, we revisit these structural changes by asking whether they have been reversed as labor market inequality fell over the last decade. Drawing on restri…
Economics (19 works) · Labour economics (16 works) · Employment and Welfare Studies (11 works) · Labor market dynamics and wage inequality (9 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (9 works) · Business (7 works) · Inequality (7 works) · Political science (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Wage (6 works)