Downward wage rigidity limits the downward adjustment of wages, especially during recessions. Although macroeconomic models generally suggest that wage rigidity exacerbates employment losses and generates asymmetric business cycles, direct empirical evidence is scarce. In this paper, we...

In employment relationships, a wage is an installment payment on an implicit long-term agreement between a worker and a firm. The price of labor that impacts firm's hiring decisions, instead, reflects the hiring wage as well as the impact of economic conditions at the time of hiring on future...

Typical measures of wages, such as average hourly earnings, fail to capture cyclicality in the effective cost of labor in the presence of (i) cyclical fluctuations in the quality of worker-firm matches, or (ii) wages being smoothed within employment matches. To address both concerns, we estimate...

Do labour institutions influence how wages respond to the business cycle? Such responsiveness can then shape several economic outcomes, including unemployment. In this paper, we examine the role of two key labour market institutions - collective bargaining and temporary contracts - upon wage...

Rigidity in wages has long been thought to impede the functioning of labor markets. One recent strand of the research on wage flexibility in the United States and elsewhere has focused on the possibility of downward nominal wage rigidity and what implications such rigidity might have for the...

Do labour institutions influence how wages respond to the business cycle? Such responsiveness can then shape several economic outcomes, including unemployment. In this paper, we examine the role of two key labour market institutions - collective bargaining and temporary contracts - upon wage...

This paper studies the impact of downward wage rigidity on wage dynamics and employment flows after the outbreak of major recessions over the last 30 years in Spain. Downward wage rigidity stems from collective agreements, which set province-industry-skill specific minimum wage floors for all...

This paper studies the impact of downward wage rigidity on wage and employment dynamics after the outbreak of major recessions in Spain. Downward wage rigidity stems from collective agreements, which set province-sector-skill specific minimum wage floors for all workers. By exploiting variation...

The paper aims at investigating to what extent wage negotiation set-ups have shaped up firms' response to the Great Recession, taking a firm-level cross-country perspective. We contribute to the literature by building a new micro-distributed database which merges data related to wage bargaining...

There is a growing concern about collective wage agreement and employment dynamics in Germany. In this paper, evidence is provided on the way collective wage agreements affect the adjustment of working hours, employment and other production factors when firms from the service sector are faced...