Christian Philip Hoeck defends his PhD thesis at the Department of Economics

Candidate:

Christian Philip Hoeck , Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

Title:

Firm-Level Wage and Price Setting

Supervisors:

• Daniel le Maire, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen
• Søren Hove Ravn, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen

Assessment Committee:

• Nikolaj Arpe Harmon, Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen
• Ana Rute Cardoso, Associate Research Professor, Institute for Economic Analysis, Spanish National Research Council 
• Jonathon Hazell, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, London School of Economics

Summary:

In this dissertation, I investigate how firms set their wages and prices and the economic incentives that drive these decisions. The firm is the fundamental unit of the economy, where labor and capital meet to produce a valuable good or service. The prices and wages offered by firms are critical in deciding what and how much is produced and who gets to consume it. Naturally, the wage- and price-setting behavior of firms has always been a core topic in economics. With the advent of modern administrative data, new ways of illuminating this topic have opened up, and this dissertation follows that trend. While each chapter draws heavily on economic theory, they are fundamentally empirical. This dissertation consists of three self-contained chapters examining differences in wage growth across firms, firms’ beliefs about wages, and how firms change their prices in response to changes in demand.

An electronic copy of the dissertation can be requested here: lema@econ.ku.dk