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Working Paper
Downward Wage Rigidities and Recession Dynamics in Advanced and Emerging Economies*
Downward wage rigidity limits the downward adjustment of wages, especially during recessions. Although macroeconomic models generally suggest that wage rigidity exacerbates employment losses and generates asymmetric business cycles, direct empirical evidence is scarce. In this paper, we construct a data set covering 53countries, including both emerging markets and advanced economies, to measure and compare downward real wage rigidities across countries. We find that wage rigidities are widespread, but overall higher in emerging markets. We provide empirical evidence that countries with higher ...
Working Paper
Who’s In and Who’s Out under Workplace COVID Symptom Screening?
COVID symptom screening, a new workplace practice, is likely to affect many millions of American workers in the coming months. Eleven states already require and federal guidance recommends frequent screening of employees for infection symptoms. This paper provides some of the first empirical work exploring the tradeoffs employers face in using daily symptom screening. First, we find that common symptom checkers will likely screen out up to 7 percent of workers each day, depending on the measure used. Second, we find that the measures used will matter for three reasons: many respondents report ...
Working Paper
Endogenous Bargaining Power and Declining Labor Compensation Share
Workhorse search and matching models assume constant bargaining weights, while recent evidence indicates that weights vary across time and in cross section. We endogenize bargaining weights in a life-cycle search and matching model by replacing a standard Cobb-Douglas (CD) matching function with a general constant elasticity of substitution (CES) matching function and study the implications for the long-term labor share and bargaining power in the U.S. The CES model explains 64 percent of the reported decline in the labor share since 1980, while the CD model explains only 28 percent of the ...