We relate origin-destination real price differences to immigrants' reservation wages and their career trajectories, exploiting administrative data from Germany and the 2004 enlargement of the European Union. We find that immigrants who enter Germany when a unit of earnings from Germany allows...

We relate origin-destination real price differences to immigrants' reservation wages and their career trajectories, exploiting administrative data from Germany and the 2004 enlargement of the European Union. We find that immigrants who enter Germany when a unit of earnings from Germany allows...

Women report setting lower reservation wages than men in survey data. We show that women set reservation wages that are 14 to 18 percent lower than men's in laboratory search experiments that control for factors not fully observed in surveys such as offer distributions and outside options. This...

We measure individual bias in labor market expectations in German survey data and find that workers on average significantly overestimate their individual probabilities to separate from their job when employed as well to find a job when unemployed. These biases vary significantly between...

This study examines changes in reservation wages during the pandemic using data on desired wages among job seekers in Japan. The effects of occupational characteristics, municipal fear of infection risk, local labor market tightness and financial support on the changes in the reservation wages...

This study examines jobseekers’ preferences for job attributes and explores heterogeneity across sociodemographic groups, based on a choice experiment where approximately 1850 clients of the Flemish Public Employment Service (PES) who became unemployed 5 to 6 months before, and around 2000...

Unemployment insurance provides temporary cash benefits to eligible unemployed workers. Benefits are sometimes extended by discretion during economic slumps. In a model that features temporary benefits and sequential job opportunities, a worker's reservation wages are studied when policymakers...

We evaluate the impacts of a randomized job-fair intervention in which jobseekers and employers can meet at low cost. The intervention generates few hires, but it lowers participants' expectations and causes both firms and workers to invest more in search as predicted by a theoretical model;...

The COVID-19 pandemic can change the reservation wage because of changes in people’s preferences due to the risk of infection, the accelerating trend of remote work, and the worsened household economy. Using data from Japan on job seekers’ desired wages, we found that the upward trend of...

The present paper examines the reservation wages reported by a largesample of unemployed individuals in the United States in May 1976. The majorityof unemployedindividuals report reservation wages that are at least as highas the wage they were paid on their last job. Approximately one-fourth of...

In this paper we provide the first evidence on workers' perceptions of the returns to job search effort. The perceived job finding probability is nearly linear in hours searched and only slightly concave for most respondents. While workers are over-optimistic about the probability of receiving a...

Search frictions impede the labor market. Despite this indisputable fact, it is a priori unclear how job search costs affect search duration and unemployment: lower search costs make it easier to find a job, reducing search duration and unemployment, but may also increase the reservation wage,...

Formal sector entry-level jobs in Mexico offer low starting salaries but substantial wage growth. This paper experimentally tests whether a six-months wage incentive can increase formal employment among secondary school graduates. Combining survey and high-frequency social security data, the...

Occupational prestige or job status may induce people to remain unemployed even when jobs are available. Thus measured unemployment will always have a voluntary component. Accumulated wealth in a family tends to increase the opportunity cost of job search, more so in a world where job status is...

The COVID-19 pandemic can change the reservation wage because of changes in people’s preferences due to the risk of infection, the rapid rise of work at home, or a worsened household economy. Furthermore, the changing reservation wage changes the decision to work, especially for the second...

When a job-seeker and an employer meet, find a prospective surplus, and bargain over the wage, conditions in the outside labor market, including especially unemployment, may be irrelevant. The job-seeker's threat point in the bargain is to delay bargaining, not to terminate bargaining and resume...

How does impatience affect job search? More impatient workers search less intensively and set a lower reservation wage. The effect on the exit rate from unemployment is unclear. In this paper we show that, if agents have exponential time preferences, the reservation wage effect dominates for...

This study examines the determinants of the reservation wage of unemployed persons in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1976. The theoretical section presents the derivation of an optimal reservation wage and shows the source of an ambiguity of some explanatory variables. The data basis are...

This paper uses data from the European Community Household Panel, 1994-99, to investigate the arrival rate of job offers, the determinants of reservation wages, transitions out of unemployment, and accepted wages. In this exploratory treatment, we report that the arrival rate of job offers...

This paper investigates whether job offers arrive more frequently for those in employment than for those in unemployment. To this end, we take advantage of a unique Australian data set which contains information on both accepted and rejected job offers. Our estimation strategy takes account of...

Authors who consider efficient bargaining on the labor market predominantly focus on the Nash-bargaining solution. It seems, however, that actual labor market negotiations between an employers' federation and a labor union are often characterized by mutual concessions, which may be accounted for...

This paper provides new empirical evidence on the relationship between reservation wages of unemployed workers and macroeconomic factors - including aggregate and local unemployment rates, generosity of the unemployment compensation system and characteristics of the wage structure - as well as...

Do firms reduce employment when their insiders (established, incumbent employees) claim higher wages? The conventional answer in the theoretical literature is that insider power has no influence on employment, provided that the newly hired employees (entrants) receive their reservation wages....

This paper explicitly differentiates between unemployment and inactivity, by defining inactivity as a state in which individuals do not search for jobs when non-employed. Facing changes in the value of inactivity, individuals transit through three labor market states. In steady-state, we hence...

Labor market programs may affect unemployed individuals' behavior before they enroll. Such ex ante effects are hard to identify without model assumptions. We develop a novel method that relates self-reported perceived treatment rates and job-search behavioral outcomes, like the reservation wage,...

This paper exploits survey information on reservation wages and data on actual wages from the European Community Household Panel to deduce in the manner of Lancaster and Chesher (1983) additional parameters of a stylized structural search model; specifically, reservation wage and...

Using cross-country data, we investigate the determinants of reservation wages and their course over the jobless spell. Higher unemployment benefits lead to higher reservation wages. Further, again consistent with the basic search model, repeated observations on the same individual provide scant...

We examine how group-specific differences in reservation wage, arising due to asymmetries in social entitlements, impact on distribution via the joint determination of class conflict between workers and employers, and 'ethnic' conflict among workers. We model a two-dimensional contest, where two...

We analyse how different labour market institutions - employment protection versus flexicurity - affect technology adoption in unionised firms. We consider both trade unions' incentives to oppose or endorse labour-saving technology, and firms' incentives to invest in such technology. We find...

This paper extends previous research about the determinants of reservation wages by analysing the effect of progressive income taxation on the ratio between reservation and net market wages. Based on micro data for Germany (SOEP) we show that joint income taxation in Germany which discriminates...

The paper is an empirical cross-section study of the retirement decisions of American white men between the ages of 58 and 67. predicated on the theoretical notion that an individual retires when his reservation wage exceeds his market wage. Reservation wages are derived from an explicit utility...

Survey measures of the reservation wage reflect both the consumption-leisure trade-off and job search concerns (the arrival rate of job offers and the wage distribution). We examine what a survey measure of the reservation wage reveals about labor supply when search concerns are absent. To this...

Unemployment insurance (UI) can affect unemployment duration and re-employment wages, through various dimensions of unemployed workers' job search behavior. We shed light on the effects of UI on job search behavior using new longitudinal data: we link administrative registers to data from a...

Survey measures of the reservation wage reflect both the consumption-leisure trade-off and job search concerns (the arrival rate of job offers and the wage distribution). We examine what a survey measure of the reservation wage reveals about labor supply when search concerns are absent. To this...

Understanding jobseeker preferences---including their reservation wages and how much they value different non-wage amenities---is difficult because they are unobservable. We test four different methods for estimating these preference parameters using an experiment in a job-matching center. We...

Recent changes in labor arrangements have increased interest in estimating and understanding the value of job flexibility. We leverage a large natural field experiment at Uber to create exogenous variation in expected market wages across individuals and over time. Combining this experiment with...