Blanchflower and Oswald (1994) reported that they have found an ‘empirical law of economics' – the Wage Curve. Our paper reconsiders the western German Wage Curve using disaggregated regional data and is based on almost one million employees drawn from the Federal Employment Services of...

In 1994, Blanchflower and Oswald reported that they have found an "empirical law of economics" - the Wage Curve. According to their empirical results, the elasticity of wages with respect to regional unemployment is -0.1. This holds especially for the Anglo-Saxon countries. Our paper reconsiders...

The wage curve literature consistently finds a negative relationship between regional unemployment rates and regional wages; the most widely accepted theoretical explanations interpret the unemployment rate as a measure of job competition. This paper proposes new ways of measuring job...