This paper assesses the relationship between government and manufacturing wages. We find that the long-run relation between the two wages is stronger when the government is a large employer. Manufacturing wages are better aligned with productivity and unemployment when public wages, to which...

This paper shows that the bunching of wages at round numbers is partly driven by firm coarse wage-setting. Using data from over 200 million new hires in Brazil, I first establish that contracted salaries tend to cluster at round numbers. Then, I show that firms that tend to hire workers at...

Using the German IAB Job Vacancy Survey, we look into the black box of recruiting intensity and hiring practices from the employers' perspective. Our paper evaluates three important channels for hiring - namely vacancy posting, the selectivity of hiring (labor selection), and the number of...

We show how size-contingent laws can be used to identify the equilibrium and welfare effects of labor regulation. Our framework incorporates such regulations into the Lucas (1978) model and applies this to France where many labor laws start to bind on firms with exactly 50 or more employees....

In the last decades, the OECD labor markets faced important labor supply changes with the arrival of women and the cohorts of the baby-boom. Using a survey where workers declare their true employment experience, this paper argues that these supply trends imply more inexperienced workers. It then...

In a two-sector-economy with real wage rigidity, we examine how technical progress in one sector affects aggregate unemployment. We show that aggregate unemployment decreases for uneven technical change in the case of Cobb-Douglas production functions. For every type of technical progress there...

For more than 80 years, many macroeconomic analyses have been premised on the assumption that workers' nominal wage rates cannot be cut. The U.S. evidence on this assumption has been inconclusive because of distortions from reporting error in household surveys. Following a British literature, we...

For more than 80 years, many macroeconomic analyses have been premised on the assumption that workers' nominal wage rates cannot be cut. Contrary evidence from household surveys reasonably has been discounted on the ground that the measurement of frequent wage cuts might be an artifact of...

Examines the evolution of the cyclicality of real wages and employment in four Latin American economies: Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Mexico, during the period 1980-2010. Wages are highly pro-cyclical during the 1980s and early 1990s, a period characterized by high inflation. As inflation...

This paper evaluates the extent of wage rigidities in Colombia over a period, 2002-2014, in which the fall in unemployment was relatively slow with respect to sustained economic growth. Following Holden and Wulfsberg (2009), we compute a measure of downward real wage rigidity (DRWR) of 12.09%,...