Why Wages Don’t Fall in Jobs with Incomplete Contracts

The authors are grateful for helpful comments from Julia Darby, Mike Elsby, Matthias Fahn, Markus Gehrsitz, Jochen Güntner, Stuart McIntyre, Jonathan Norris, Heiko Stüber, as well as participants at the Scottish Economic Society Annual Conference in 2022. Marco Fongoni also thanks the Department of Economics at the University of Strathclyde for support at an early stage of this project. This work is based on the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings Data Set and the Workplace Employment Relations Study (Crown 2023), having been funded, collected, and deposited by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) under secure access conditions with the UK Data Service (SN:6689 and SN:6712). Neither the ONS nor the Data Service bear any responsibility for the analysis and discussion of the results in this paper.