Does import competition alter the extent to which employers, after negotiating workers’ wages upon hire, subsequently shield those wages from external labor-market conditions? If increased competition induces a switch away from these wage implicit agreements, then (1) the sensitivity of workers’ wages to the current unemployment rate should increase as competition increases and (2) the sensitiv...

An exhaustive empirical and theoretical study conducted by Blanchflower and Oswald (1994) found a new empirical regularity of the negative relationship between wages and regional unemployment, that is, the ‘wage curve.’ The curve is roughly described by – 0.1 of the elasticity of wages with respect to the local unemployment rate with human capital characteristics of individual workers controlle...

A Contribution to the Empirics of Reservation Wages This paper provides evidence on the behavior of reservation wages over the spell of unemployment using high‐frequency longitudinal data. Using data from our survey of unemployed workers in New Jersey, where workers were interviewed each week for up to 24 weeks, we find that self‐reported reservation wages decline at a modest rate over the spel...

The perspective of modern macroeconomic theory, be it new classical or old and new Keynesian, is that unemployment can be reduced only if real wages are cut. The modern Keynesians, basing themselves upon the microfoundations of efficiency wage theory, argue that real wages cannot and will not be cut by firms for efficiency wage reasons. This generates involuntary unemployment based on a market ...

In this paper we show that panel estimates of tenure speci…c sensitivity to the business cycle of wages is subject to serious pitfalls. Three canonical variates used in the literature the minimum unemployment rate during a worker’s time at the …rm(minu), the unemployment rate at the start of her tenure(Su) and the current unemployment rate interacted with a new hire dummy( u) can all be signi…c...

New Insights on Unemployment Duration and Post Unemployment Earnings in Germany: Censored Box-Cox Quantile Regression at Work In light of nonstationary search theory (van den Berg, 1990), this paper estimates the effects of benefit entitlement periods and the size of unemployment benefits on unemployment durations and post-unemployment earnings in West Germany. For the unemployment duration, we...

This paper characterizes the optimal redistributive taxation when individuals are heterogeneous in two exogenous dimensions: their skills and their values of non-market activities. Search-matching frictions on the labor markets create unemployment. Wages, labor demand and participation are endogenous. The government only observes wage levels. Under a Maximin objective, if the elasticity of part...

This paper shows that switching the dominant use of household-specific sticky wages in the New Keynesian model (Erceg, Henderson, and Levin 2000) for firm-specific sticky wages has qualitative and quantitative consequences. First, the model with firm-specific sticky wages incorporates endogenous changes in the rate of unemployment, whereas there is no unemployment with household-specific sticky...

In economies where the price of labour is determined outside of competitive markets the question arises as to whether the observed evolution of wages is likely to contribute to a decline in unemployment. I develop and discuss a benchmark, the neutral wage policy, to which the actual evolution of wages can be compared. Here, neutrality refers to the unemployment rate and not to the level of empl...