The determinants and consequences of unemployed workers' wage demands

This paper studies the determinants and labor market consequences of unemployed workers' wage demands using direct data on the workers' actual wage requests. Our results show that most workers want a wage close to what they earned in their previous jobs, and thus much more than they get in unemployment benefits. However, our results also show that some groups, such as women, tend to systematically demand lower wages. Also, we find that workers with high wage demands are contacted by firms less often than otherwise similar workers with lower wage demands. Thus our results indicate that too high wage demands may contribute to high unemployment.