Dobbelaere, S. and Mairesse, J. (2018). Comparing micro-evidence on rent sharing from two different econometric models Labour Economics, 52:18--26.

The extent to which employers share rents with their employees is typically assessed by estimating the responsiveness of workers{\textquoteright} wages on firms{\textquoteright} ability to pay. This paper compares rent-sharing estimates using such a wage determination regression with estimates based on a productivity regression that relies on standard firm-level input and output data. Using a large matched firm-worker panel data sample for French manufacturing, we find that the respective industry distributions of the rent-sharing estimates are correlated and slightly overlap, but are significantly different on average. Precisely, if we only rely on the firm-level information, we obtain an average rent-sharing estimate of roughly 0.30 for the productivity regression and 0.17 for the wage determination regression. When we also take advantage of the worker-level information to control for unobserved worker ability in the model of wage determination, we find as expected a lower average value of 0.10.