United States Department of the Treasury
Publishes on Economic Theory and Policy, Global Financial Crisis and Policies, Banking stability, regulation, efficiency. 290 papers and 10.7k citations.
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This paper introduces the fair wage-effort hypothesis and explores its implications. This hypothesis is motivated by equity theory in social psychology and social exchange theory in sociology. According to the fair wage-effort hypothesis, workers proportionately withdraw effort as their actual wage falls short of their fair wage. Such behavior causes unemployment and is also consistent with observed cross-section wage differentials and unemployment patterns.
I. Introduction, 475.—II. The model: positive properties, 477.—III. The model: normative properties, 490.—IV. Implications and conclusion, 495.
Keynesian economists hold it to be self-evident that business cycles are characterized by involuntary unemployment. But construction of a model of the cycle with involuntary unemployment faces the obvious difficulty of explaining why the labor market does not clear. Involuntarily unemployed people, by definition, want to work at less than the going wage rate. Why don’t firms cut wages, thereby increasing profits?
This paper presents a model in which insignificantly suboptimal behavior causes aggregate demand shocks to have significant real effects. The individual loss to agents with inertial price-wage behavior is second-order in terms of the parameter describing the shock, while the effect on real economic variables is first-order. Thus, significant changes in business activity can be generated by anticipated money supply changes provided that some agents are willing to engage in nonmaximizing behavior which results in small losses.