A Fair Wage Explanation of Labour Market Volatility

Robert Calvert Jump

Studies in Economics from School of Economics, University of Kent

Abstract: This paper proposes an explanation for observed differences in the business cycle volatility of employment and unemployment across a sample of OECD countries. Using an incomplete markets variant of the fair wage real business cycle model, increases in the gross replacement rate of public unemployment insurance are shown to increase the volatility of employment, and decrease the volatility of real wages, ceteris paribus. For a sample of 14 OECD countries over the period 1985-2005, the gross replacement rate is found to be positively correlated with the business cycle volatility of hours worked, lending support to the argument. A secondary contribution, which may be of some use in the incomplete markets literature, is the simple manner in which unemployment is endogenised in the model.

Keywords: Fair Wages; Unemployment; Incomplete Markets (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E24 E32 J64 J65 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dge, nep-lab and nep-mac
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.kent.ac.uk/economics/repec/1413.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:ukc:ukcedp:1413

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Studies in Economics from School of Economics, University of Kent School of Economics, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7FS.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr Anirban Mitra ().