IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/
MyIDEAS: Log in (now much improved!) to save this paper

Inflation and Labor-Market Adjustment

Author Info

Listed author(s):
  • Daniel S. Hamermesh

Abstract

The implications of downward nominal and ex ante real wage rigidity,and of wage contracting for the dispersion of relative wage changes in the presence of price inflation are examined. Rigidity implies that unexpected inflation will raise the variability of relative wage changes; contracting implies unexpected inflation reduces variability. Using data on manufacturing industries for 1955-81, and on private nonfarm industries for1965-81,these hypotheses are studied. The dispersion in relative wage cnanges is reduced by greater price inflation. Most of the reduction is a response to unexpected inflation: Expected inflation has little impact on dispersion.These findings hold for subperiods within the sample, and are robust to different choices of measures of price expectations,including those of the Livingston survey, the Survey Research Center household data, and ARMA forecasts. They stand in striking contrast to the commonly accepted result that price inflation is associated with greater dispersion of relative price changes. They suggest that inflation reduces the ability of relative wages to signal disequilibria among labor markets.

Download Info

If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.

File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w1153.pdf
Download Restriction: no

Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 1153.

as
in new window

Length:
Date of creation: Jun 1983
Publication status: published as Hamermesh, Daniel S. "Inflation and Labor-Market Adjustment." Economica, Vol. 53, (February 1986), pp. 63-73.
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:1153
Note: LS
Contact details of provider: Postal:
National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.

Phone: 617-868-3900
Web page: http://www.nber.org
Email:


More information through EDIRC

Keywords:

Other versions of this item:

References listed on IDEAS
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.:

as
in new window


  1. Cukierman, Alex & Wachtel, Paul, 1982. "Relative Price Variability and Nonuniform Inflationary Expectations," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 90(1), pages 146-157, February.
  2. MaCurdy, Thomas E, 1981. "An Empirical Model of Labor Supply in a Life-Cycle Setting," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 89(6), pages 1059-1085, December.
  3. Joseph G. Altonji, 1982. "The Intertemporal Substitution Model of Labour Market Fluctuations: An Empirical Analysis," Review of Economic Studies, Oxford University Press, vol. 49(5), pages 783-824.
  4. Friedman, Milton, 1977. "Nobel Lecture: Inflation and Unemployment," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 85(3), pages 451-472, June.
  5. Daniel S. Hamermesh, 1970. "Wage Bargains, Threshold Effects, and the Phillips Curve," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 84(3), pages 501-517.
  6. Tobin, James, 1972. "Inflation and Unemployment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 62(1), pages 1-18, March.
  7. Wachter, Michael L, 1970. "Cyclical Variation in the Interindustry Wage Structure," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 60(1), pages 75-84, March.
  8. Lilien, David M, 1982. "Sectoral Shifts and Cyclical Unemployment," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 90(4), pages 777-793, August.
  9. Parks, Richard W, 1978. "Inflation and Relative Price Variability," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 86(1), pages 79-95, February.
  10. Beach, Charles M & MacKinnon, James G, 1978. "A Maximum Likelihood Procedure for Regression with Autocorrelated Errors," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 46(1), pages 51-58, January.
  11. Rees, Albert, 1970. "The Phillips Curve as a Menu for Policy Choice," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 37(147), pages 227-238, August.
  12. Azariadis, Costas, 1975. "Implicit Contracts and Underemployment Equilibria," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 83(6), pages 1183-1202, December.
  13. Fischer, Stanley, 1982. "Relative price variability and inflation in the United States and Germany," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 18(2), pages 171-196.
  14. Fischer, Stanley, 1982. "Relative price variability and inflation in the United States and Germany," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 18(1), pages 171-196.
  15. Lucas, Robert E, Jr & Rapping, Leonard A, 1969. "Real Wages, Employment, and Inflation," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 77(5), pages 721-754, Sept./Oct.
Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

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

as
in new window


Cited by:

  1. Andre Portela Souza, 2002. "Wage Inequality Changes in Brazil: Market Forces, Macroeconomic Instability and Labor Market Institutions (1981-1997)," Vanderbilt University Department of Economics Working Papers 0215, Vanderbilt University Department of Economics.
  2. Allen, Steven G, 1987. "Relative Wage Variability in the United States, 1860-1983," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 69(4), pages 617-626, November.
  3. Erica L. Groshen & Mark E. Schweitzer, 1996. "Macro- and microeconomic consequences of wage rigidity," Working Paper 9607, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
  4. Smith, Peter N. & Thomas, Stephen H., 1991. "Wage dispersion and inflation : Evidence from U.K. manufacturing industries," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 37(4), pages 357-362, December.
  5. Erica L. Groshen & Mark E. Schweitzer, 1994. "The effects of inflation on wage adjustments in firm-level data: grease or sand?," Working Paper 9418, Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.

This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.

Access and download statistics

When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:1153. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ()

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 references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.

If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link 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 profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

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

This information is provided to you by IDEAS at the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis using RePEc data.