What if Wages Fell During a Recession?

Joy A. Buchanan () and Daniel Houser
Additional contact information
Joy A. Buchanan: Brock School of Business, Samford University

No 1062, Working Papers from George Mason University, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science

Abstract: Many economies exhibit downward wage rigidity. Surveys of managers by Bewley [1999] and Campbell and Kamlani [1997] indicate that employers hold wages rigid because they believe morale will suffer after a wage cut. Otherwise, there is little evidence for how employers’ beliefs about workers contribute to wage rigidity and whether those beliefs are accurate. We demonstrate that effort falls after workers experience a wage cut and also that workers form reference points from wage contracts. Despite this partial confirmation of the †morale theory†as an explanation for wage rigidity, half of the employers in our experiment cut wages and lose money as a result. Because our design allows us to compare beliefs and effort precisely, we find that when employers don’t believe the morale theory they will not hold wages rigid. In a treatment where a recession is offset by nominal inflation, real wage cuts do not have a significant effect. Loss averse employers are less likely to cut wages and more likely to correctly predict the negative effect of wage cuts.

Keywords: experimental; economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D84 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26
Date: 2017-06, Revised 2017-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hrm and nep-lma
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.gmu.edu/schools/chss/economics/icesworkingpapers.gmu.edu/pdf/1062.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gms:wpaper:1062

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from George Mason University, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Shams Bahabib ().