Taxes, Risk Aversion and Unemployment Insurance as Causes of Wage Rigidity

Per Lundborg

No 160, Working Paper Series from Trade Union Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: Recent empirical evidence has shown that nominal wages are more rigid among blue-collar (low income) workers than among white-collar (high income) workers. We show theoretically that employees in crisis-ridden firms will reject wage cut proposals that save jobs if risk aversion is great, replacement rates high and marginal taxes low. These factors for can explain why wage rigidity is less intense among high-income earners than among low-income earners. We argue, that with economic growth nominal wages should become more flexible, since marginal taxes increase, the marginal utility of income drops, normally, replacement rates fall.

Keywords: Wage rigidity; Marginal taxes; Risk aversion; Unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H20 J30 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2000-05-25
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab, nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://swopec.hhs.se/fiefwp/papers/WP160.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:hhs:fiefwp:0160

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Paper Series from Trade Union Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sune Karlsson ().