IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/3051.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Testing for Contracting Effects on Employment

Author

Listed:
  • Mark Bils

Abstract

I test the importance of wage rigidities from long-term contracts by observing how employment behaves when firms and workers recontract. If rigidities are important then we should observe employment adjusting after recontracting to undo movements in employment during the past contract that were excessive due to rigid wages. The data are for twelve manufacturing industries that display a strong bargaining pattern. I find that contract rigidities are important, causing considerably larger fluctuations in employment than would occur with flexible wages. By far the most striking case is in motor vehicles where long-term contracts much more than double the size of fluctuations in employment. I also examine the behavior of wage rates when new contracts are introduced. Wage growth does respond to employment growth during the prior contract in several of the industries; but these responses are not related to the pattern of employment responses across industries.

Suggested Citation

  • Mark Bils, 1989. "Testing for Contracting Effects on Employment," NBER Working Papers 3051, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3051
    Note: EFG
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w3051.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Prescott, Edward C., 1986. "Theory ahead of business-cycle measurement," Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy, Elsevier, vol. 25(1), pages 11-44, January.
    2. Rod Cross, 2000. "Hysteresis and Emu," Metroeconomica, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 51(4), pages 367-379, November.
    3. Hall, Robert E & Lilien, David M, 1979. "Efficient Wage Bargains under Uncertain Supply and Demand," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 69(5), pages 868-879, December.
    4. Gray, Jo Anna, 1978. "On Indexation and Contract Length," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 86(1), pages 1-18, February.
    5. Geary, Patrick T & Kennan, John, 1982. "The Employment-Real Wage Relationship: An International Study," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 90(4), pages 854-871, August.
    6. Olivier J. Blanchard & Lawrence H. Summers, 1986. "Hysteresis and the European Unemployment Problem," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1986, Volume 1, pages 15-90, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Blanchard, Olivier J. & Summers, Lawrence H., 1987. "Hysteresis in unemployment," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 31(1-2), pages 288-295.
    8. Julio J. Rotemberg, 1987. "The New Keynesian Microfoundations," NBER Chapters, in: NBER Macroeconomics Annual 1987, Volume 2, pages 69-116, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    9. Fischer, Stanley, 1977. "Long-Term Contracts, Rational Expectations, and the Optimal Money Supply Rule," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 85(1), pages 191-205, February.
    10. Barro, Robert J., 1977. "Long-term contracting, sticky prices, and monetary policy," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 3(3), pages 305-316, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Boldrin, Michael & Horvath, Michael, 1995. "Labor Contracts and Business Cycles," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(5), pages 972-1004, October.
    2. Ghosal, Vivek & Loungani, Prakash, 1996. "Evidence on Nominal Wage Rigidity from a Panel of U.S. Manufacturing Industries," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 28(4), pages 650-668, November.
    3. Andrew Charlton, 2003. "Nominal Wage Rigidity in The Australian Labour Market: Evidence from household Data," Australian Journal of Labour Economics (AJLE), Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre (BCEC), Curtin Business School, vol. 6(1), pages 25-36, March.
    4. Wallace, Frederick H, 2001. "The Effects of Shock Size and Type on Labor-Contract Duration," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 19(3), pages 658-681, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Blanchard, Olivier Jean & Quah, Danny, 1989. "The Dynamic Effects of Aggregate Demand and Supply Disturbances," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 79(4), pages 655-673, September.
    2. Hubert Kempf, 1990. "Externalités et contrats salariaux," Économie et Prévision, Programme National Persée, vol. 92(1), pages 51-60.
    3. Card, David, 1990. "Unexpected Inflation, Real Wages, and Employment Determination in Union Contracts," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 80(4), pages 669-688, September.
    4. M. Scattaglia, 1994. "Politiche per l'occupazione e Microfondamenti "Keynesiani" dell'economia del lavoro," Working Papers 196, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    5. Pierre Cahuc, 1990. "La théorie des négociations salariales : une revue de la littérature," Économie et Prévision, Programme National Persée, vol. 92(1), pages 21-30.
    6. Justin Doran & Bernard Fingleton, 2014. "Economic shocks and growth: Spatio-temporal perspectives on Europe's economies in a time of crisis," Papers in Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 93, pages 137-165, November.
    7. N. Gregory Mankiw & Ricardo Reis, 2002. "Sticky Information versus Sticky Prices: A Proposal to Replace the New Keynesian Phillips Curve," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 117(4), pages 1295-1328.
    8. repec:aeb:wpaper:201604:i:4:y:2016 is not listed on IDEAS
    9. Alan S. Blinder, 1988. "The Fall and Rise of Keynesian Economics," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 64(4), pages 278-294, December.
    10. Laurence Ball & N. Gregory Mankiw, 2002. "The NAIRU in Theory and Practice," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 16(4), pages 115-136, Fall.
    11. Richard K. Crump & Stefano Eusepi & Marc Giannoni & Aysegul Sahin, 2019. "A Unified Approach to Measuring u," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 50(1 (Spring), pages 143-238.
    12. Robert J. Barro, 1989. "New Classicals and Keynesians, or the Good Guys and the Bad Guys," Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics (SJES), Swiss Society of Economics and Statistics (SSES), vol. 125(III), pages 263-273, September.
    13. Jordi Gali, 1999. "Technology, Employment, and the Business Cycle: Do Technology Shocks Explain Aggregate Fluctuations?," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 89(1), pages 249-271, March.
    14. Göcke, Matthias, 2012. "Play-hysteresis in supply as part of a market model," Discussion Papers 61, Justus Liebig University Giessen, Center for international Development and Environmental Research (ZEU).
    15. Ambler, Steven & Cardia, Emanuela & Phaneuf, Louis, 1992. "Contrats de salaire, croissance endogène et fluctuations," L'Actualité Economique, Société Canadienne de Science Economique, vol. 68(1), pages 175-204, mars et j.
    16. Jordi Gali, 2005. "Trends in hours, balanced growth, and the role of technology in the business cycle," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 87(Jul), pages 459-486.
    17. Ernesto Screpanti, 2000. "Wages, Employment, and Militancy: A Simple Model and Some Empirical Tests," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 32(2), pages 171-196, June.
    18. Robert J. Gordon, 2011. "The History of the Phillips Curve: Consensus and Bifurcation," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 78(309), pages 10-50, January.
    19. Carol Dole & David Denslow & Mark Rush, 2000. "The link between output and contracts under hyperinflation," Atlantic Economic Journal, Springer;International Atlantic Economic Society, vol. 28(2), pages 140-149, June.
    20. Holzer, Harry J & Montgomery, Edward B, 1993. "Asymmetries and Rigidities in Wage Adjustments by Firms," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 75(3), pages 397-408, August.
    21. Stanley Fischer, 1995. "Modern Approaches to Central Banking," NBER Working Papers 5064, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:3051. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.