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Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity in the United States During and After the Great Recession

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Abstract

Rigidity in wages has long been thought to impede the functioning of labor markets. In this paper, we investigate the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in US labor markets using job-level data from a nationally representative establishment-based compensation survey collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We use several distinct methods to test for downward nominal wage rigidity and to assess whether such rigidity is less or more severe in the presence of negative economic shocks than in more normal economic times. We find a significant amount of downward nominal wage rigidity in the United States and no evidence that the high degree of labor market distress during the Great Recession reduced downward nominal wage rigidity. We further find a lower degree of nominal rigidity at multi-year horizons.

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  • Bruce Fallick & Daniel Villar Vallenas & William L. Wascher, 2016. "Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity in the United States During and After the Great Recession," Finance and Economics Discussion Series 2016-001r1, Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.), revised 15 May 2020.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2016-01
    DOI: 10.17016/FEDS.2016.001r1
    Note: Revision
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    Cited by:

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    2. Daniel Schaefer & Carl Singleton, . "The Extent of Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity: New Evidence from Payroll Data," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics.
    3. Kazuma Inagaki, & Yoshiyasu Ono & Takayuki Tsuruga, 2022. "Accounting for the slowdown in output growth after the Great Recession: A wealth preference approach," ISER Discussion Paper 1174, Institute of Social and Economic Research, Osaka University.
    4. Komarek, Timothy M. & Butts, Kyle & Wagner, Gary A., 2022. "Government Contracting, Labor Intensity, and the Local Effects of Fiscal Consolidation: Evidence from the Budget Control Act of 2011," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 132(C).
    5. Iwasaki, Yuto & Muto, Ichiro & Shintani, Mototsugu, 2021. "Missing wage inflation? Estimating the natural rate of unemployment in a nonlinear DSGE model," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 132(C).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Labor markets; Recessions; Wage rigidity;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • J30 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - General
    • E24 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Employment; Unemployment; Wages; Intergenerational Income Distribution; Aggregate Human Capital; Aggregate Labor Productivity

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