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...

Using administrative data from Germany, this paper analyzes the relation between wages and past and current labor market conditions. Specifically, it explores whether the data is more consistent with implicit contract models (Beaudry/DiNardo, 1991) or a matching model with on-the-job search and...

Using administrative employer-employee data from Germany, we investigate the relationship between wages and past and present labor market conditions. Furthermore, we revisit recent findings of greater wage cyclicality of new hires. Overall, we find strong evidence for history dependent wages,...

Using employer-employee data from Germany, this paper analyzes the relationship between wages and past and contemporaneous labor market conditions. Specifically, we test the implications of implicit contract models (Beaudry and DiNardo, 1991) and an on-the-job search model (Hagedorn and...

This paper studies the effects of endogenous participation on unemployment fluctuations. It shows that the wage channel is the key to understanding them. Endogenous participation makes the expected outside options of workers countercyclical. Under Nash bargaining, this induces a countercyclical...

Economists face difficulties explaining the strong cyclicality of US unemployment. This paper contributes both by developing modeling tools and evaluating a potentially important explanation. The paper develops a parsimonious equilibrium model of job search with aggregate productivity shocks,...

We construct an equilibrium theory of learning from search in the labor market, which addresses the search behavior of workers, the creation of jobs, and the wage distribution as functions of unemployment duration. In the model, each worker has incomplete information about his job-finding...

We examine the labor market effects of incomplete information about the workers' own job-finding process. Search outcomes convey valuable information, and learning from search generates endogenous heterogeneity in workers' beliefs about their job-finding probability. We characterize this process...

We study the importance of wage rigidities for the monetary policy transmission mechanism. Using uniquely rich micro data on Swedish wage negotiations, we isolate periods when the labor market is covered by fixed wage contracts. Importantly, negotiations are coordinated in time but their...