IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecofin/v21y2010i2p165-181.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Did U.S. wages become stickier between the world wars?

Author

Listed:
  • Dighe, Ranjit S.
  • Schmitt, Elizabeth Dunne

Abstract

This paper attempts to determine whether nominal wages became less responsive to labor market and price fluctuations during the 1920s or 1930s. Results of modified Phillips curve regressions, in which the monthly value of wages depends on lagged values of employment or total man-hours and prices, indicate considerable stickiness of wages throughout the interwar period. Neither the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929 nor the start of the New Deal in 1933 is associated with any discernible increase in wage stickiness. And the "Great Deflation" of 1920-1922 apparently did not include a greater responsiveness of wages to prices or labor-market conditions.

Suggested Citation

  • Dighe, Ranjit S. & Schmitt, Elizabeth Dunne, 2010. "Did U.S. wages become stickier between the world wars?," The North American Journal of Economics and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 21(2), pages 165-181, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecofin:v:21:y:2010:i:2:p:165-181
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1062-9408(10)00014-8
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. A. W. Phillips, 1958. "The Relation Between Unemployment and the Rate of Change of Money Wage Rates in the United Kingdom, 1861–1957," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 25(100), pages 283-299, November.
    2. John A. James, 1998. "The Early History of Nominal Wage Rigidity in American Industrial Labor Markets," Rivista di storia economica, Società editrice il Mulino, issue 3, pages 243-274.
    3. Hodrick, Robert J & Prescott, Edward C, 1997. "Postwar U.S. Business Cycles: An Empirical Investigation," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 29(1), pages 1-16, February.
    4. Allen, Steven G, 1992. "Changes in the Cyclical Sensitivity of Wages in the United States, 1891-1987," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(1), pages 122-140, March.
    5. Christopher J. Erceg & Michael D. Bordo & Charles L. Evans, 2000. "Money, Sticky Wages, and the Great Depression," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(5), pages 1447-1463, December.
    6. Newey, Whitney & West, Kenneth, 2014. "A simple, positive semi-definite, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation consistent covariance matrix," Applied Econometrics, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), vol. 33(1), pages 125-132.
    7. Hanes, Christopher, 1996. "Changes in the Cyclical Behavior of Real Wage Rates, 1870–1990," The Journal of Economic History, Cambridge University Press, vol. 56(4), pages 837-861, December.
    8. Katharine G. Abraham & John C. Haltiwanger, 1995. "Real Wages and the Business Cycle," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 33(3), pages 1215-1264, September.
    9. Gordon, Robert J, 1982. "Why U.S. Wage and Employment Behaviour Differs from That in Britain and Japan," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 92(365), pages 13-44, March.
    10. Elliott, Graham & Rothenberg, Thomas J & Stock, James H, 1996. "Efficient Tests for an Autoregressive Unit Root," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 64(4), pages 813-836, July.
    11. Ronald G. Bodkin, 1962. "The Wage-Price Productivity Nexus," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 147, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    12. Daniel Creamer & Martin Bernstein, 1950. "Behavior of Wage Rates during Business Cycles," NBER Books, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc, number crea50-1.
    13. Temin, Peter & Wigmore, Barrie A., 1990. "The end of one big deflation," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 27(4), pages 483-502, October.
    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. Robert W. Dimand, 2014. "James Tobin and Modern Monetary Theory," Center for the History of Political Economy Working Paper Series 2014-5, Center for the History of Political Economy.
    2. Nina Dodig & Hansjorg Herr, 2014. "Previous financial crises leading to stagnation – selected case studies," Working papers wpaper24, Financialisation, Economy, Society & Sustainable Development (FESSUD) Project.

    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. Baffigi, Alberto & Bontempi, Maria Elena & Felice, Emanuele & Golinelli, Roberto, 2015. "The changing relationship between inflation and the economic cycle in Italy: 1861–2012," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 56(C), pages 53-70.
    2. Chernyshoff, Natalia & Jacks, David S. & Taylor, Alan M., 2009. "Stuck on gold: Real exchange rate volatility and the rise and fall of the gold standard, 1875-1939," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(2), pages 195-205, April.
    3. David Greasley & Les Oxley, 2010. "Cliometrics And Time Series Econometrics: Some Theory And Applications," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 24(5), pages 970-1042, December.
    4. Binder, Carola Conces, 2016. "Estimation of historical inflation expectations," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 1-31.
    5. McKnight, Stephen & Mihailov, Alexander & Rumler, Fabio, 2020. "Inflation forecasting using the New Keynesian Phillips Curve with a time-varying trend," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 87(C), pages 383-393.
    6. Alan M. Taylor & Natalia Chernyshoff & David Jacks, 2005. "Stuck on Gold:Real Exchange Rate Volatility and the Rise and Fall of the Gold Standard, 1870?1939," Working Papers 237, University of California, Davis, Department of Economics.
    7. Johanna Amberger & Ralf Fendel, 2017. "Understanding inflation dynamics in the Euro Area: deviants and commonalities across member countries," Empirica, Springer;Austrian Institute for Economic Research;Austrian Economic Association, vol. 44(2), pages 261-293, May.
    8. Vitek, Francis, 2006. "Measuring the Stance of Monetary Policy in a Small Open Economy: A Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Approach," MPRA Paper 802, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    9. Carlos Medel, 2017. "Forecasting Chilean inflation with the hybrid new keynesian Phillips curve: globalisation, combination, and accuracy," Journal Economía Chilena (The Chilean Economy), Central Bank of Chile, vol. 20(3), pages 004-050, December.
    10. Vicente Esteve & Manuel Navarro-Ibáñez & María A. Prats, 2013. "The present value model of US stock prices revisited: long-run evidence with structural breaks, 1871-2010," Working Papers 04/13, Instituto Universitario de Análisis Económico y Social.
    11. Edward Ghartey, 2006. "Exchange Pressure, Sterilized Intervention and Monetary Policy in Ghana," EcoMod2006 272100031, EcoMod.
    12. Todd E. Clark & Michael W. McCracken, 2010. "Averaging forecasts from VARs with uncertain instabilities," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 25(1), pages 5-29, January.
    13. Hall, Viv B & Thomson, Peter, 2022. "A boosted HP filter for business cycle analysis: evidence from New Zealand’s small open economy," Working Paper Series 9473, Victoria University of Wellington, School of Economics and Finance.
    14. Delgado Narro, Augusto Ricardo, 2020. "The Process of Convergence among the Japanese Prefectures: 1955 - 2012," MPRA Paper 100361, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    15. Emma Iglesias & Jean Marie Dufour, 2004. "Finite Sample and Optimal Inference in Possibly Nonstationary ARCH Models with Gaussian and Heavy-Tailed Errors," Econometric Society 2004 North American Summer Meetings 161, Econometric Society.
    16. Adriana Cornea‐Madeira & João Madeira, 2022. "Econometric Analysis of Switching Expectations in UK Inflation," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 84(3), pages 651-673, June.
    17. Mohamed Osman & Ariful Hoque & Kamrul Hassan, 2016. "Business Cycle Asymmetries and Nonlinearity in UAE Macroeconomic Time Series," Australian Economic Papers, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 55(4), pages 476-490, December.
    18. Nikolay Gospodinov & Ian Irvine, 2005. "A ‘long march’ perspective on tobacco use in Canada," Canadian Journal of Economics/Revue canadienne d'économique, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 38(2), pages 366-393, May.
    19. Joseph P. Byrne & Dimitris Korobilis & Pinho J. Ribeiro, 2018. "On The Sources Of Uncertainty In Exchange Rate Predictability," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 59(1), pages 329-357, February.
    20. Jason Lennard, 2023. "Sticky wages and the Great Depression: evidence from the United Kingdom," European Review of Economic History, European Historical Economics Society, vol. 27(2), pages 196-222.

    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:eee:ecofin:v:21:y:2010:i:2:p:165-181. 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: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/inca/620163 .

    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.