기업규모별 임금격차의 변화에 관한 연구 = A Study on Wage Difference in terms of Firm Sizes

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Since the 1960s, Korea’s wage difference based on the firm sizes have showed a tendency to expand as a result of the government's policy or major economic events. Especially due to foreign exchange crisis occurred in November 1997, the firms had to execute structural adjustment in order to overcome the crisis and the wage structure was changed to high-cost structure from low-cost structure. In this process, wage difference in terms of the firm sizes had risen rapidly through the 2000s from 1998. Under these circumstances, the financial crisis occurred in 2008 is a significant event that could have had another big impact to wage difference in terms of the firm sizes. Accordingly, this study was focused on analyzing the changes 2008 financial crisis brought on the wage difference in terms of the firm sizes.
This study had analyzed the change of wage difference in terms of firm sizes prior and after 2008 financial crisis, for the period of 2007 to 2009, through cross-sectional analysis using the ordinary least squares(OLS) estimation method and the analysis of the panel using fixed effects model. Looking at the cross-sectional analysis and a fixed effects analysis, it can be seen that 2008 financial crisis has expanded the wage difference in terms of firm sizes. Fundamental way to reduce wage difference in terms of firm sizes is to create an environment where highly productive workers seek to work in a small and medium-sized businesses. Through the financial crisis, the domestic-based small and medium-sized businesses are faced with a difficult situation compared with the export-focused conglomerate. Due to these reasons, small and medium-sized businesses continue the vicious cycle of reduced productivity of workers due to less capital and low-wages, and the influx of low-productivity workers. Eventually, in order to shrink the wage difference between large firms and small to medium-sized businesses, strong financial support is needed in order to promote productivity through expanding expertise, development of technology, and to creating an environment where small and medium-sized businesses can acquire highly productive workers.