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A European-type wage equation from an American-style labor market: Evidence from a panel of Norwegian manufacturing industries in the 1930s

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  • Gunnar Bårdsen

    (Norges Bank)

  • Jurgen Doornik
  • Jan Tore Klovland

Abstract

Using a newly constructed panel of manufacturing industry data for interwar Norway, we estimate a long-run wage curve for the 1930s that has all the modern features of being homogeneous in prices, proportional to productivity, and having an unemployment elasticity of -0.1. This result is more typical of contemporary European than U.S. wage equations, even if the labour market in interwar Norway possessed distinctively more ‘American’ features than those associated with present-day European welfare states. We also present some new Monte Carlo evidence on the properties of the estimators used.

Suggested Citation

  • Gunnar Bårdsen & Jurgen Doornik & Jan Tore Klovland, 2004. "A European-type wage equation from an American-style labor market: Evidence from a panel of Norwegian manufacturing industries in the 1930s," Working Paper 2004/8, Norges Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:bno:worpap:2004_08
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    Cited by:

    1. Alfonso Arpaia & Giuseppe Carone, 2004. "Do labour taxes (and their composition) affect wages in the short and in the long run?," Public Economics 0411004, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    2. David G. Blanchflower & Andrew J. Oswald, 2005. "The Wage Curve Reloaded," NBER Working Papers 11338, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    wages; depression; panel data; dynamics;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity
    • N24 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - Europe: 1913-

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