01942cas a2200241 a 4500 AALejournalIMF008841 230101c9999 xx r poo 0 0eng d 5.00 USD 9781451861532 1018-5941 BD-DhAAL BD-DhAAL International Monetary Fund. Wage Flexibility in Turbulent Times : A Practitioner's Guide, with an Application to Poland. Washington, D.C. : International Monetary Fund, 2005. 1 online resource (33 pages) IMF Working Papers <strong>Off-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required <strong>On-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required Electronic access restricted to authorized BRAC University faculty, staff and students This paper reviews several methods to measure wage flexibility, and their suitability for evaluating the extent of such flexibility during times of structural change, when wage distributions and wage curves can be particularly volatile. The paper uses nonparametric estimation to capture possible nonlinearities in the wage curve and relaxes the assumption of a stable wage distribution over time by linking the shape of the wage change distribution to macroeconomic variables. The proposed methodology is applied to Polish micro data. The estimates confirm that wages are less elastic in a high-unemployment/low-wage environment. Based on a comparison of actual and counterfactual wage distributions, the effects of nominal wage rigidities on real wages, and thus, on the labor market and the real economy, were limited until 1998, but have been quite significant thereafter. Mode of access: Internet IMF Working Papers; Working Paper ; No. 2005/134 Full text available on IMF http://elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2005/134/001.2005.issue-134-en.xml IMF e-Library