On January the 11th of 2016, the 47th BNU Business School Expert Forum was held in Beijing Normal University Business School. Professor Claudia Senik from the Economics department of Université Paris IV - Sorbonne was invited to be the guest speaker. Her topic was “Wage Comparisons in and out of the Firm – Evidence from a Matched Employer-Employee French Database”. Hosted by Prof. Li Shi, over one hundred students and teachers attended this forum.

Prof. Senik is a member of the IZA and the InstitutUniversitaire de France. Educated at the EcoleNormaleSupérieure, she received her PhD degree from EHESS. Her main research areas include happiness studies, political attitudes and post-transition economies, with a special interest in the subjective welfare effects of income growth and income distribution.

Based on a matched employer-employee dataset, Prof. Senik’s research focused on the association between wage satisfaction and other-people’s payment. Data showed that three notions of reference wage appear to be particularly important: (i) the median wage level in the firm, (ii) the level of wage of similar workers in the region, and (iii) the top 1% wage in the firm.These findings are based on objective measures of earnings as well as subjective declarations about wage satisfaction, awareness of other people’s payment and reported income comparisons.After a brief conclusion, Prof. Senik also proposed that sensing other people’s negative work mood will affect wage satisfaction degree and happy emotionsin one’s work.

This forum was a great success, participants expressed that they were enlightened by Prof. Senik’s research and some have even found new research angles.