The U.S. economy had experienced the "jobless recovering" after the 1990-1991 and 2001 recessions, which has been constantly puzzling the economists, market analysts, and policymakers. This paper uses a simple hiring game in an efficiency wage model framework to resolve that puzzle. Our efficiency wage model emphasizes the importance of the local unemployment rate, which is endogenously determined by firms' hiring decision at a symmetric Nash equilibrium. Our model has a new feature such that nonzero steady involuntary unemployment at equilibrium may coexist with an efficiency wage that stays below the market-clearing wage. Moreover, we show how it is possible to use our model to study income inequality as a result of skill-biased technical change, inter-industry wage differentials, and skill wage premiums. We also demonstrate how it is possible to derive the wage curve (Blanchflower and Oswald (1994)) as an equilibrium locus of our model.
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Paper provided by Rutgers University, Department of Economics in its series Departmental Working Papers with number
200404.
References listed on IDEAS 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.:
David Card, 1995.
"The Wage Curve: A Review,"
Working Papers
722, Princeton University, Department of Economics, Industrial Relations Section..
[Downloadable!]
Blanchflower, D. & Oswald, A., 1989.
"The Wage Curve,"
Papers
340, London School of Economics - Centre for Labour Economics.
David G. Blanchflower & Andrew J. Oswald, 1990.
"The Wage Curve,"
NBER Working Papers
3181, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Andrew J. Oswald & David G. Blanchflower, 1995.
"The Wage Curve,"
MIT Press Books,
The MIT Press,
edition 1, volume 1, number 026202375x, December.
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