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Real Wages Over The Business Cycle

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Author Info
Robert B. Barsky
Gary Solon

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Abstract

This paper is an examination of cyclical real wage behavior in the United States since World War II. Like most previous aggregate studies. ours finds little cyclicalitv in aggregate industry real wage data. On the other hand, our analysis of longitudinal microdata from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics reveals substantial procyclicality. We find that this procyclicality is obscured in industry average wage statistics, and to a lesser extent in economywide averages, because those statistics are constructed in a way that gives greater weight to low-wage workers during expansions. The almost complete absence of evidence for countercyclical real wages suggests that movements along labor demand curves have not played a dominant role in cyclical employment fluctuations over the last 40 years. Instead, the procyclicality of real wages indicates that cyclical employment fluctuations have been generated mainly by shifts in labor demand. The sources of these shifts and of the positive slope of the effective labor supply curve, however, remain open to alternative interpretations.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 2888.

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Date of creation: Mar 1989
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:2888

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Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
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  2. Altonji, Joseph G, 1986. "Intertemporal Substitution in Labor Supply: Evidence from Micro Data," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 94(3), pages S176-S215, June. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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Full references

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(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Raven E. Saks & Abigail Wozniak, 2007. "Labor Reallocation over the Business Cycle: New Evidence from Internal Migration," IZA Discussion Papers 2766, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  2. Philip Oreopoulos & Till von Wachter & Andrew Heisz, 2006. "The Short- and Long-Term Career Effects of Graduating in a Recession: Hysteresis and Heterogeneity in the Market for College Graduates," NBER Working Papers 12159, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  3. Gary Solon & Robert Barsky & Jonathan A. Parker, 1992. "Measuring the Cyclicality of Real Wages: How Important is Composition Bias," NBER Working Papers 4202, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  4. Peter A. Tinsley & Reva Krieger, . "Asymmetric Adjustments of Price and Output," Computing in Economics and Finance 1996 _059, Society for Computational Economics. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  5. Eric T. Swanson, 1999. "Measuring the cyclicality of real wages: how important is aggregation across industries?," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 1999-52, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.). [Downloadable!]
  6. Judith A. Chevalier & David S. Scharfstein, 1994. "Capital Market Imperfections and Countercyclical Markups: Theory and Evidence," NBER Working Papers 4614, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  7. Donggyun Shin & Gary Solon, 2006. "New Evidence on Real Wage Cyclicality within Employer-Employee Matches," NBER Working Papers 12262, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  8. Eric T. Swanson, 2007. "Real wage cyclicality in the PSID," Working Paper Series 2007-15, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. [Downloadable!]
  9. Anindya BANERJEE & Bill RUSSEL, 2002. "Inflation Measures of the Markup," Economics Working Papers ECO2002/15, European University Institute. [Downloadable!]
  10. Sharon J. Erenburg, . "Linking Public Capital to Economic Performance, Public Capital: The Missing Link Between Investment and Economic Growth ," Economics Public Policy Brief Archive 14, Levy Economics Institute, The. [Downloadable!]
  11. Sharon J. Erenburg, 1993. "Productivity, Private and Public Capital, and Real Wage in the United States, 1948-1990," Economics Working Paper Archive 94, Levy Economics Institute, The. [Downloadable!]
  12. Jang-Ok Cho & Louis Phaneuf, 1993. "A business cycle model with nominal wage contracts and government," Discussion Paper / Institute for Empirical Macroeconomics 80, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  13. Kevin M. Murphy & Andrei Shleifer & Robert W. Vishny, 1989. "Building Blocks of Market Clearing Business Cycle Models," NBER Working Papers 3004, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  14. Julio J. Rotemberg & Michael Woodford, 1990. "Cyclical Markups: Theories and Evidence," NBER Working Papers 3534, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  15. Finn E. Kydland & Edward C. Prescott, 1993. "Cyclical movements of the labor input and its implicit real wage," Economic Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, issue Q II, pages 12-23. [Downloadable!]
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