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 Great...

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...

We use a random survey of Swedish human resource managers to study the reasons for wage rigidity. Our findings are as follows. First, during the exceptional recession of the 1990s only 1.1 percent of workers received a wage cut. Second, much wage rigidity can be traced to behavioral mechanisms...

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...

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...

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...

A number of recent studies have documented extensive downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) for job stayers in many OECD countries. However, DNWR for individual workers may induce downward rigidity or a floorʺ for the aggregate wage growth at positive or negative levels. Aggregate wage growth...

We introduce search and matching unemployment into a model of trade with differentiated goods and heterogeneous firms. Countries may differ with respect to size, geographical location, and labor market institutions. Contrary to the literature, our single-sector perspective pays special attention...

In a multi-country general equilibrium economy with mobile capital and rigid-wage unemployment, countries may differ in capital endowments, production technologies and rigid wages. Governments tax capital at the source to maximize national welfare. They account for tax base responses to their...

This paper develops a statistical framework of steady-state identities which enable us to match the distributions of durations found in the micro-data to generalized Taylor and Calvo models of time-dependent pricing. We illustrate the approach with the UK micro CPI data for 2006-2009, and employ...