IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/18006.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Comparing Real Wages

Author

Listed:
  • Orley C. Ashenfelter

Abstract

A real wage rate is a nominal wage rate divided by the price of a good and is a transparent measure of how much of the good an hour of work buys. It provides an important indicator of the living standards of workers, and also of the productivity of workers. In this paper I set out the conceptual basis for such measures, provide some historical examples, and then provide my own preliminary analysis of a decade long project designed to measure the wages of workers doing the same job in over 60 countries--workers at McDonald's restaurants. The results demonstrate that the wage rates of workers using the same skills and doing the same jobs differ by as much as 10 to 1, and that these gaps declined over the period 2000-2007, but with much less progress since the Great Recession.

Suggested Citation

  • Orley C. Ashenfelter, 2012. "Comparing Real Wages," NBER Working Papers 18006, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18006
    Note: LS
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w18006.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kenneth Rogoff, 1996. "The Purchasing Power Parity Puzzle," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 34(2), pages 647-668, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Emily A. Beam & David McKenzie & Dean Yang, 2016. "Unilateral Facilitation Does Not Raise International Labor Migration from the Philippines," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 64(2), pages 323-368.
    2. Michael Clemens and Timothy N. Ogden, 2014. "Migration as a Strategy for Household Finance: A Research Agenda on Remittances, Payments, and Development- Working Paper 354," Working Papers 354, Center for Global Development.
    3. Tara McGrath & Renaud Legoux & Sylvain Sénécal, 2017. "Balancing the score: the financial impact of resource dependence on symphony orchestras," Journal of Cultural Economics, Springer;The Association for Cultural Economics International, vol. 41(4), pages 421-439, November.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Cho, Guedae & Kim, MinKyoung & Koo, Won W., 2003. "Relative Agricultural Price Changes In Different Time Horizons," 2003 Annual meeting, July 27-30, Montreal, Canada 22249, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    2. Kevin X. D. Huang & Zheng Liu, 2004. "Multiple stages of processing and the quantity anomaly in international business cycle models," Working Papers 04-8, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia.
    3. Agnès Bénassy‐Quéré & Lionel Fontagné & Horst Raff, 2011. "Exchange‐rate Misalignments in Duopoly: The Case of Airbus and Boeing," The World Economy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 34(4), pages 623-641, April.
    4. Couharde, Cécile & Delatte, Anne-Laure & Grekou, Carl & Mignon, Valérie & Morvillier, Florian, 2020. "Measuring the Balassa-Samuelson effect: A guidance note on the RPROD database," International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 161(C), pages 237-247.
    5. Lothian, James R., 1997. "Multi-country evidence on the behavior of purchasing power parity under the current float," Journal of International Money and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 19-35, February.
    6. Zanin, Luca & Marra, Giampiero, 2012. "Assessing the functional relationship between CO2 emissions and economic development using an additive mixed model approach," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 29(4), pages 1328-1337.
    7. Jaebeom Kim & Masao Ogaki & Minseok Yang, 2007. "Structural Error Correction Models: A System Method for Linear Rational Expectations Models and an Application to an Exchange Rate Model," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 39(8), pages 2057-2075, December.
    8. Eden, Benjamin, 2007. "Inefficient trade patterns: Excessive trade, cross-hauling and dumping," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 73(1), pages 175-188, September.
    9. Balázs Égert, 2007. "Real Convergence, Price Level Convergence and Inflation in Europe," Working Papers 267, Bruegel.
    10. Daniel Buncic, 2012. "Understanding forecast failure of ESTAR models of real exchange rates," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 43(1), pages 399-426, August.
    11. repec:onb:oenbwp:y::i:29:b:1 is not listed on IDEAS
    12. Britta Gehrke & Fang Yao, 2016. "Persistence and volatility of real exchange rates: the role of supply shocks revisited," Reserve Bank of New Zealand Discussion Paper Series DP2016/02, Reserve Bank of New Zealand.
    13. Stefan Ried, 2009. "Putting Up a Good Fight: The Galí-Monacelli Model versus “The Six Major Puzzles in International Macroeconomicsâ€," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2009-020, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
    14. Giorgio Canarella & Luis A. Gil-Alana & Rangan Gupta & Stephen M. Miller, 2022. "Globalization, long memory, and real interest rate convergence: a historical perspective," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 63(5), pages 2331-2355, November.
    15. Hong, Seung Hyun & Phillips, Peter C. B., 2010. "Testing Linearity in Cointegrating Relations With an Application to Purchasing Power Parity," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 28(1), pages 96-114.
    16. Valérie Mignon & Christophe Hurlin, 2007. "Une synthèse des tests de cointégration sur données de panel," Économie et Prévision, Programme National Persée, vol. 180(4), pages 241-265.
    17. Robert Kelm, 2017. "The Purchasing Power Parity Puzzle and Imperfect Knowledge: The Case of the Polish Zloty," Central European Journal of Economic Modelling and Econometrics, Central European Journal of Economic Modelling and Econometrics, vol. 9(1), pages 1-27, March.
    18. Jonathan Haskel & Holger Wolf, 2001. "The Law of One Price—A Case Study," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 103(4), pages 545-558, December.
    19. Bergin, Paul R. & Glick, Reuven & Wu, Jyh-Lin, 2014. "Mussa redux and conditional PPP," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(C), pages 101-114.
    20. Rabanal, Pau & Rubio-Ramírez, Juan F., 2015. "Can international macroeconomic models explain low-frequency movements of real exchange rates?," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(1), pages 199-211.
    21. Ethan Ilzetzki & Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff, 2020. "Will the Secular Decline in Exchange Rate and Inflation Volatility Survive COVID-19?," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 51(3 (Fall)), pages 279-332.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • J3 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs
    • O40 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - General
    • O57 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Comparative Studies of Countries

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:18006. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.