Fixed-term contracts (FTCs) may be an important tool to promote employment, particularly in recessions or when permanent contracts are costly. Therefore, it may be useful to vary some of the legal parameters of FTCs over the business cycle, namely increasing their flexibility during downturns....

This paper presents evidence that real wage cyclicality can be a particularly heterogeneous parameter, depending on different worker characteristics and also on the specific stage of the business cycle. Using matched employer-employee panel data for Portugal covering the period 1986-2004, real...

Fixed-term contracts (FTCs) may be an important tool to promote hirings and employment, particularly in recessions or when permanent contracts are costly. Therefore, it may be useful to let some of the legal parameters of FTCs (as well as those of other labour market institutions) vary...

Collective bargaining (CB) conducted by trade unions and employer associations (the social partners) plays a key role in the formation of wages in many countries. This paper investigates the potential interactions of CB with the macroeconomy by estimating the business cycle sensitivity of the...

Following insights by Bewley (1999a), this paper analyses a model with downward rigidities in which firms cannot pay discriminate based on a year of entry to a firm, and develops an equilibrium model of wages and unemployment. We solve for the dynamics of wages and unemployment under conditions...

In models recently published by several influential macroeconomic theorists, rigidity in the real wages that firms pay newly hired workers plays a crucial role in generating realistically large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment. There is remarkably little evidence, however, on whether...