Grime and punishment: job insecurity and wage arrears in the Russian Federation

Hartmut Lehmann (), Jonathan Wadsworth and Alessandro Acquisti

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The initial years of transition in the Russian Federation have been characterised by relatively smaller falls in employment than in other reform-orientated countries of eastern Europe, despite the huge negative shock caused by the move from planned to market economy. Using information from two complementary household survey data sets, we show that for many Russian workers, the dominant form of labour market adjustment has instead been the delayed receipt of wages. Other forms of adjustment at the intensive margin have not been used much. Wage arrears are found across the private, state and budgetary sector in approximately equal proportions. There are large regional variations in the incidence of wage arrears. Workers in the metropolitan centre are significantly less affected by delayed and incomplete wage payments than workers in the provinces. There is less evidence that individual characteristics contribute much toward the incidence of wage arrears, though unobserved heterogeneity may have some role to play. As with the incidence of unemployment, however, there is evidence that the persistence of arrears is concentrated on a subset of the working population. We show that workers can only exercise the exit option of a job quit from a firm paying wages in arrears if the outside labour market is sufficiently dynamic.

JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48 pages
Date: 1998-09
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/20251/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Grime and Punishment: Job Insecurity and Wage Arrears in the Russian Federation (1999)
Working Paper: Grime and Punishment: Job Insecurity and Wage Arrears in the Russian Federation (1999)
Working Paper: Grime and Punishment: Job Insecurity and Wage Arrears in the Russian Federation (1998)
Working Paper: Grime And Punishment: Job Insecurity And Wage Arrears in The Russian Federation (1998)
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:ehl:lserod:20251

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().