2025-01-30
5 分钟The Economist Hello, Mike Byrd here, co-host of Money Talks,
our weekly podcast on markets, the economy and business.
Welcome to Editor's Picks.
We've chosen an article from the latest edition of The Economist,
which we very much hope you'll enjoy.
How much do your colleagues get paid?
In a few countries, such as Norway,
you can take a good guess by looking at public records on individuals' overall tax payments and income.
But in most places, finding out people's salaries means asking them what they earn.
And that is about as socially acceptable as saying, what an ugly baby.
In a recent study,
Zoe Cullen of Harvard Business School and Ricardo Perez Trullia of the University of California Los Angeles offered monetary rewards to employees of a South East Asian bank
if they were able to accurately estimate the wages of some of their peers.
The researchers found that a majority of employees were very uncomfortable about asking colleagues about their pay and were also unwilling to reveal their own salaries to their colleagues,
particularly if they thought they might be earning more than them.
Norms of privacy and secrecy around income help explain why legislators who fret about unfair pay differentials increasingly require greater transparency.
Few jurisdictions are as radical as the Scandinavians,
but more and more of them are mandating that firms disclose gender and other wage gaps,
publish pay ranges on job adverts or refrain from asking about applicants' prior earnings.
New transparency laws take effect in Illinois, Minnesota and Vermont this year.