Wage and job-skill distributions in the National Compensation Survey

Using nationally representative data on the specific skills required for individual jobs, we study how wage and skill distributions vary with firm type, as defined by a firm’s median wage. We show that firms typically do not specialize by hiring similar workers. On the contrary, the distribution of wages and skills at middleand high-wage firms is nearly as broad as the distribution in the entire population. Low-wage firms, however, have a more compact distribution of skills. The wage and skill distributions in high-wage firms skew leftward, whereas the distributions in low-wage firms skew rightward. We show that the skill requirements of low-wage jobs differ modestly by firm type, while the skill requirements of high-wage jobs are lower at high-wage firms than at lowand middle-wage firms.