A thorny problem in identifying the determinants of reservation wages and particularly the role of continued joblessness in their evolution is the simultaneity issue. We deploy a natural control function approach to the problem that involves conditioning elapsed duration on completed...

Using cross-country data, we investigate the determinants of reservation wages and their course over the jobless spell. Higher unemployment benefits lead to higher reservation wages. Further, again consistent with the basic search model, repeated observations on the same individual provide scant...

Focusing on the compression of wage cuts, many empirical studies find a high degree of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR). However, the resulting macroeconomic effects seem to be surprisingly weak. This contradiction can be explained within an intertemporal framework in which DNWR not only...

We develop a model which shows that wages, prices and real income should grow faster in countries with low increase in their labour force. If not, other countries experience growing unemployment and/or trade deficit. This result is applied to the case of Germany, which has displayed a...

Many of the recent attempts to find evidence of downward nominal wage rigidity in micro data have suffered from a number of problems, including composition bias and the effects of measurement error. In order to avoid these problems we explicitly model the determinants of wage changes and the...