Contract Violations, Neighborhood Effects, and Wage Arrears in Russia
by
John S. Earle, Klara Sabirianova Peter
(June 2004)
revised version published as' Complementarity and Custom in Wage Contract Violation' in: Review of Economicss and Statistics, 2009, 91(4), 832 - 849
Abstract:
We present a model of neighborhood effects in wage payment delays. Positive feedback
arises because each employer’s arrears affect the late payment costs faced by other firms in
the same local labor market, resulting in a strategic complementarity in the practice. The
model is estimated on panel data for workers and firms in Russia, facilitating identification
through the use of a rich set of covariates and fixed effects at the level of the employee, the
employer, and the local labor market. We also exploit a policy intervention affecting public
sector workers that provides an instrumental variable to estimate the endogenous reaction in
the non-public sector. Consistently across specifications, the estimated reaction function
displays strongly positive neighborhood effects, and the estimates of four feedback loops –
operating through worker quits, effort, strikes, and legal penalties – imply that costs of delays
are attenuated by neighborhood arrears. We also study a nonlinear case exhibiting two
stable equilibria: a “punctual payment equilibrium” and a “late payment equilibrium.” The
estimates imply that the theoretical conditions for multiple equilibria under symmetric local
labor market competition are satisfied in our data.
Text: See Discussion Paper No. 1198
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