We report the results from a representative survey of human resource managers in 885 Swedish firms. We estimate that during the severe recession of the 1990s, only 1.1 percent of workers took a cut in regular nominal pay. We trace the lack of wage moderation to a combination of exogenous...

We study a sample of individuals in 20 European countries that includes eight East European countries in order to identify whether these eight countries differ from the Western countries in the popularity of right-wing populist parties once we have controlled for personal attributes. The results...

We analyse the implications of habit formation relating to wages in a multi-period efficiency-wage model. If employees have such preferences, their existence provides firms with incentives to raise wages and reduce employment over time. Greater intensity does not necessarily have the same...

Using employer-employee panel data, we provide novel facts on how real wages and working hours within jobs responded to the UK’s Great Recession. In contrast to previous studies, our data enables us to address the cyclical composition of jobs. We show that firms were able to respond to the...

This paper considers a two-period optimal contracting model in which firms make new hires in the second period subject to the constraint that they cannot pay discriminate either against or in favour of the new hires. Under an assumption on the information available to workers, it is shown that...

The combination of discretionary monetary policy, labor-market distortions and nominal wage rigidity yields an inflation bias as monetary policy tries to exploit nominal wage contracts to address labour-market distortions Although an inflation target eliminates this inflation bias, it creates a...

This paper reports the results from a controlled field experiment designed to investigate the causal effect of public recognition on employee performance. We hired more than 300 employees to work on a three-hour data-entry task. In a random sample of work groups, workers unexpectedly received...

Gift exchange experiments have demonstrated that norms can affect labor market outcomes and provided an explanation for involuntary unemployment. However, conflicting results from laboratory and field experiments have questioned the relevance of gift exchange and helped spark an ongoing debate...

Organizations must not only take the right decisions, they must also ensure that these decisions are effectively implemented. Fama & Jensen (1983) argue that the same members of many organization are often responsible for both decision initiation and implementation. If these have social...