IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/rba/rbardp/rdp1999-02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Reservation Wages and the Duration of Unemployment

Author

Listed:
  • Alexandra Heath

    (Reserve Bank of Australia)

  • Troy Swann

    (Reserve Bank of Australia)

Abstract

This paper investigates those factors which affect the duration of unemployment of Australian job seekers. The analysis uses data on individual job seekers from the Survey of Employment and Unemployment Patterns (SEUP) to assess the influence of a comprehensive array of personal and background characteristics on the duration of unemployment. The data set also provides job seekers’ responses concerning their minimum acceptable (or reservation) wage. The results suggest that around one-fifth of adult unemployed job seekers would be willing to work for a wage less than the legal minimum. It is also found that a job seekers’ reservation wage has little effect on his/her unemployment duration. Instead, the binding constraint for job seekers appears to be that they receive very few job offers. Although legal minimum wages could be part of the story, more research is required to properly understand their role in the dynamics of the labour market.

Suggested Citation

  • Alexandra Heath & Troy Swann, 1999. "Reservation Wages and the Duration of Unemployment," RBA Research Discussion Papers rdp1999-02, Reserve Bank of Australia.
    • Handle: RePEc:rba:rbardp:rdp1999-02
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/rdp/1999/pdf/rdp1999-02.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Christensen, Björn, 2003. "Selektionsverzerrungen, erfragte Reservationslöhne und Arbeitslosigkeitsdauer," Kiel Working Papers 1162, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    2. Nordlund, Madelende & Strandh, Mattias, 2014. "The relation between economic and non-economic incentives to work and employment chances among the unemployed," Working Paper Series 2014:23, IFAU - Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy.
    3. Jeff Borland, 2000. "Disaggregated Models of Unemployment in Australia," Melbourne Institute Working Paper Series wp2000n16, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, The University of Melbourne.
    4. Vera A. Adamchik & Josef C. Brada & Arthur E. King, 2009. "Are Transition Economy Workers Underpaid?," Working Papers 278, Leibniz Institut für Ost- und Südosteuropaforschung (Institute for East and Southeast European Studies).
    5. Marit Rõõm, 2003. "Reservation wages in Estonia," Labor and Demography 0303001, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Christensen, Björn, 2001. "The Determinants of Reservation Wages in Germany Does a Motivation Gap Exist?," Kiel Working Papers 1024, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).
    7. Mushfek-Ul-Alam Chowdhury & Md. Aynul Islam, 2022. "Reservation Wage for High Skilled Graduates in Bangladesh: Preliminary Factors," International Business Research, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 15(12), pages 1-1, December.
    8. Böheim, René, 2002. "The association between reported and calculated reservation wages," ISER Working Paper Series 2002-07, Institute for Social and Economic Research.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    reservation wage; unemployment duration; minimum wage;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J64 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Mobility, Unemployment, Vacancies, and Immigrant Workers - - - Unemployment: Models, Duration, Incidence, and Job Search

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:rba:rbardp:rdp1999-02. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Paula Drew (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/rbagvau.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.