Grime and Punishment: Job Insecurity and Wage Arrears in the Russian Federation

Using information from two complementary household survey data sets, we show that the dominant form of labor market adjustment in the Russian transition process has been the delayed receipt of wages. More than half the work force is experiencing some form of disruption of their pay. Wage arrears are found across the private, state, and budgetary sectors. Workers in the metropolitan center are less affected by delayed and incomplete wage payments than are workers in the provinces. There is less evidence that individual characteristics contribute much toward the incidence of wage arrears, but the persistence of arrears is concentrated on a subset of the working population. We show that workers can only exercise the exit option of a job quit from a firm not paying wages in full or on time if the outside labor market is sufficiently dynamic. J. Comp. Econom., December 1999, 27(4), pp. 595–617. Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh EH14 4AS, United Kingdom, IZA, Bonn, Germany, and WDI, Ann Arbor, Michigan; Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, London WC2AE 2AE, England, and Royal Holloway College, University of London, Egham, TW20 1TQ, England; School of Information Management and Systems, University of California, 102 South Hall, Berkeley, California 94720-4600.