Interindustry wage differentials in wage regressions estimated for individuals have been interpreted as evidence consistent with efficiency wage models. A principal competing explanation is that these differentials are generated by differences across workers in unobserved ability. This paper...

This paper models and tests the implications of costly enforcement of property rights on the pattern of foreign direct investment (FDI). We posit that domestic agents have a comparative advantage over foreign agents in overcoming some of the obstacles associated with corruption and weak...

We present a model embodying moderate amounts of nominal rigidities which accounts for the observed inertia in inflation and persistence in output. The key features of our model are those that prevent a sharp rise in marginal costs after an expansionary shock to monetary policy. Of these...

Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that true wage changes have many fewer nominal cuts and more nominal freezes than reported nominal wage changes. The data overwhelmingly rejects a model of flexible wage changes and provides some evidence against a model of perfect downward...

This paper examines the ability of a simple stylized general equilibrium model that incorporates nominal wage rigidity to explain the magnitude and persistence of the Great Depression in the United States. The impulses to our analysis are money supply shocks. The Taylor contracts model is...

Inflation has been accused of causing distortionary price and wage fluctuations (sand) as well as lauded for facilitating adjustments to shocks when wages are rigid downwards (grease). This paper investigates whether these two effects can be distinguished from each other in a labor market by the...

Arguably the most important development in recent decades in US factor markets is the decline in the relative wage of the unskilled. By contrast, in Europe it is undoubtedly the rise and persistence of unemployment. Technology has been identified as a key reason for the rising US wage...

I test the importance of wage rigidities from long-term contracts by observing how employment behaves when firms and workers recontract. If rigidities are important then we should observe employment adjusting after recontracting to undo movements in employment during the past contract that were...

We take some well-known observations about the structure of the Japanese labor market and add new evidence about how it has evolved to study inflation in Japan. Our key finding is that labor market dynamics shifted after 1998 so that correlations between labor market tightness and wages weakened...

Nominal wage stickiness is an important component of recent medium-scale structural macroeconomic models, but to date there has been little microeconomic evidence supporting the assumption of sluggish nominal wage adjustment. We present evidence on the frequency of nominal wage adjustment using...