Do employers and workers underbid prevailing wages if there is unemployment? Do employers take advantage of workers' underbidding by lowering wages? We hypothesize that under conditions of incomplete labor contracts, wage levels may positively affect workers' propensity to cooperate. This, in...

We investigate how the incompleteness of an employment contract - discretionary and non-contractible effort - can affect an employer's decision about cutting nominal wages. Using matched employer-employee payroll data from Great Britain, linked to a survey of managers, we find support for the...