Wages are only mildly cyclical, implying that shocks to labour demand have a larger short-run impact on unemployment … rather than wages, at odds with the quantitative predictions of the canonical search model – even if wages are only … reservation wages, and consider an alternative reservation wage model based on reference dependence in job search. This extension …

Using cross-country data, we investigate the determinants of reservation wages and their course over the jobless spell …. Higher unemployment benefits lead to higher reservation wages. Further, again consistent with the basic search model …, repeated observations on the same individual provide scant evidence of declining reservation wages …