Workers wrongly anchor their beliefs about outside options on their current wage. In particular, low-paid workers underestimate wages elsewhere. We document this anchoring bias by eliciting workers' beliefs in a representative survey in Germany and comparing them to measures of actual outside...

This paper develops a theoretical model of a worker's decision problem under uncertainty about the optimal separation time, when holding a representative outside offer but facing fixed costs of quitting. Implications of the model's closed form solution are consistent with the quit behavior of...