... Wage Cushion and the Business Cycle Here we examine the extent to which contractual wages, on the one hand, and firm-specificwage arrangements, in the form of the wage cushion, on the other, are ... at the aggregate level. In particular, they have ignored the changes in the composition of the workforce over the cycle. The presence of compositional effectshas attracted much attention in the ... (1994), Shin (1994) and Devereux (2001) for the U.S. and Devereux and Hart (2006) and Hart (2006) for Britain].1For insightful surveys see Brandolini (1995) and Abraham and Haltiwanger (1995).1tively....