The Critical Wage, Unemployment Duration, and Wage Expectations: The Case of Chile

Abstract

This study tests the relevance of the job search model to understanding unemployment in developing countries by utilizing a 1982 data set describing unemployed men in Chile. The findings indicate that the model is relevant to a developing country: the job seekers studied based their critical wages on their perceptions of their own productivity, economic resources, and search costs, and they reduced their wage requirements as the duration of their unemployment increased. The authors also show, in the first direct test of this question, that the critical wage and the expected wage are determined jointly and that the expected wage is adjusted to duration of unemployment mainly in response to the fall in the critical wage.