A New Voice or a Waste of Time? Wage Premiums from Using Computers for Communication in the UK Workplace

The paper uses the Workplace Employee Relations Survey data on workers to investigate the wage premium from using e‐mail in the workplace against other more traditional forms of communication. I try to discern whether the existence of a premium from using e‐mail is the product of the workplace encouraging worker productivity through voice, or represents unobserved worker skills in using new technology. Results indicate that any observed premium from using e‐mail is likely to arise from unobserved worker skills, and that any premium associated with voice in the workplace is likely to result from management choosing to reward such worker involvement.