A Shred of Evidence on Theories of Wage Stickiness
通过对实际工资制定者的小规模访谈调查，发现工资削减在近年经济繁荣时期意外普遍，管理者认为公平感知在劳动力市场中起重要激励作用，且公平工资政策比单纯不降薪更复杂。研究还发现了货币幻觉的证据，并否定了效率工资模型中的逆向选择版本。
A small interview survey was undertaken to see how actual wage-setters would react to the central ideas of several economic theories of wage stickiness. Wage cuts were surprisingly prevalent in recent years, despite the booming economy. The strongest finding was that managers believe that perceptions of fairness play a major motivational role in labor markets and that a "fair " wage policy is a good deal more complicated than simply not cutting wages. We also found substantial evidence for money illusion and against the adverse-selection version of the efficiency wage model. Why are wages sticky, especially in the downward direction? Does the stickiness apply to nominal, real, or relative wages? Although these questions are central to at least some macroeco-nomic theories, satisfactory answers have eluded economists for decades—though not for lack of theoretical effort. Almost a decade ago, Arthur Okun [1981, p. 9] opined that "the Keynesian wage floor has been subjected to more Talmudic exegesis than any other passage in the history of economics. " In the intervening years the theoretical literature on wage rigidity has exploded. By now econo-mists have more theories than they know what to do with. Empirical research is supposed to discriminate among compet-ing theories; and econometric evidence may eventually eliminate some theories from contention. Currently, though, it seems to us that new theories are sprouting up faster than old ones are being rejected. Part of the problem is that many theories of wage rigidity rely on unobservable variables and hence are difficult to reject with the kinds of data that econometricians usually have. With this problem in mind, we turn in this study to an unconventional type of data, the sort that economists (alone among social scientists) rarely use: we actually asked a small sample of wage-setters about the nature and sources of wage rigidity in their own companies.'