Can Wage Dynamics in Long-term Employment Relationships Help Mitigate Financial Shocks?

Evidence suggests that financially constrained firms may offer lower wages, coupled with faster wage growth. If these constrained firms can tilt wages, cutting current wages in exchange for later increases, this potentially mitigates the impact of financial frictions or shocks. This paper studies the aggregate implications of this mitigating effect with an application to the 2008 financial crisis. I provide a new, tractable equilibrium model of wage dynamics for heterogeneous firms--some are financially constrained, some not. Risk-neutral firms post optimal long-term wage contracts to attract risk-averse workers through competitive search. When applied to the 2008 financial crisis, the model predicts that small firms, being more likely to be constrained, tend to temporarily cut workers' wages, while for large firms wages are quite smooth and stable. Counterfactual experiments in the model show that the mitigating effect can be important. For instance, if the wages within a contract were more rigid (e.g., by raising workers' risk aversion parameter from $2$ to $10$), the aggregate output would have been even lower in the crisis by about 2\% and the unemployment rate higher by about a third of a percentage point. Lastly, I find that the model has empirical support along several dimensions. The model is consistent with cyclical behavior in wage data (including new hires and job stayers' wage behavior). Its prediction that small firms cut wages much more than large firms is also consistent with micro-level data during the Great Recession.