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UNCERTAINTY AND STICKY‐DOWNWARD BUT UPWARD‐MOBILE WAGES
Author(s) -
MOORE JOHN H.
Publication year - 1975
Publication title -
economic inquiry
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.823
H-Index - 72
eISSN - 1465-7295
pISSN - 0095-2583
DOI - 10.1111/j.1465-7295.1975.tb00269.x
Subject(s) - economics , unemployment , wage , efficiency wage , labour economics , inflation (cosmology) , macroeconomics , physics , theoretical physics
The usual search models of unemployment hold that firms do not offer wage cuts to employees in time of slack demand because the employees have alternatives open to them at wages higher than the reduced wage that would be required to maintain full employment. This paper extends these models by considering employees as choosing in conditions of uncertainty and showing that refusal to accept a wage cut is often rational in the absence of a higher alternative wage. Additional implications are derived for union behavior and simultaneous inflation and unemployment.