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Minimally Altruistic Wages and Unemployment in a Matching Model

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Author Info
Julio J. Rotemberg

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Abstract

This paper presents a model in which firms recruit both unemployed and employed workers by posting vacancies. Firms act monopsonistically and set wages to retain their existing workers as well as to attract new ones. The model differs from Burdett and Mortensen (1998) in that its assumptions ensure that there is an equilibrium where all firms pay the same wage. The paper analyzes the response of this wage to exogenous changes in the marginal revenue product of labor. The paper finds parameters for which the response of wages is modest relative to the response of employment, as appears to be the case in U.S. data and shows that the insistence by workers that firms act with a minimal level of altruism can be a source of dampened wage responses. The paper also considers a setting where this minimal level of altruism is subject to fluctuations and shows that, for certain parameters, the model can explain both the standard deviations of employment and wages and the correlation between these two series over time.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 13755.

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Date of creation: Jan 2008
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13755

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D64 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Altruism
E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomics: Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution
J30 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - General
J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, and Vacancies - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search

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    Other versions:
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    Other versions:
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(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Jean-Pierre DANTHINE & André KURMANN, 2007. "The Business Cycle Implications of Reciprocity in Labor Relations," Cahiers de Recherches Economiques du Département d'Econométrie et d'Economie politique (DEEP) 07.12, Université de Lausanne, Faculté des HEC, DEEP. [Downloadable!]
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