It has been well established that the wages of individual workers react little, especially downwards, to shocks that hit their employer. This paper presents new evidence from a unique survey of firms across Europe on the prevalence of downward wage rigidity in both real and nominal terms. We...

The time series of various economic variables often exhibit asymmetry: decreases in the values tend to be sharp and fast, whereas increases usually occur slowly and gradually. We detect signs of an analogous asymmetry in firms’ wage setting behaviour on the basis of managerial surveys, with...

This report covers the main results of the study carried out on behalf of the European Commission in accordance with the service contract RTD/DirC/C4/2009/0268794 of 9 June 2009. The main objective of this project was to study, and report to the European Commission and to its Advisory Group1,...