As public sector budgets have waxed and waned in response to changes in the economic cycle over the past 30 years, public sector employers increasingly have sought to control personnel costs by resorting to measures such as wage freezes and furloughs. Not infrequently, those measures have pitted...

The wage curve identified by Blanchflower and Oswald (1994) postulates that the wage level is a decreasing function of the regional unemployment rate. In testing this hypothesis, most empirical studies have not taken into account that differences in the institutional framework may have an impact...