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Measuring the Cyclicality of Real Wages: How Important Is the Firm's Point of View?

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  • Eric T. Swanson

    (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System)

Abstract

There is a growing consensus among economists that real wages in the postwar United States have been procyclical, greatly bolstering technology-driven theories of business cycles at the expense of more classical models. This paper makes the point that technological movements in firm's labor demand curves should be tested with a wage that is deflated by the firm's own price of output, with appropriate controls for intermediate inputs, and with respect to the cyclical state of the firm's own industry, as opposed to the state of the aggregate economy. Failure to control for these factors is found to lead to substantial overrejection of the classical model. In detailed industry data, with controls for changes in worker composition, I find that a vast majority of sectors have paid real product wages that vary inversely (that is, countercyclically) with the state of their industry. 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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  • Eric T. Swanson, 2004. "Measuring the Cyclicality of Real Wages: How Important Is the Firm's Point of View?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 86(1), pages 362-377, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:restat:v:86:y:2004:i:1:p:362-377
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    Cited by:

    1. Eichengreen, Barry & Park, Donghyun & Shin, Kwanho, 2017. "Should the dangers of deflation be dismissed?," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 52(C), pages 287-307.
    2. Eran Hoffmann, 2018. "The Cyclical Composition of Startups," 2018 Meeting Papers 553, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    3. Grace Weishi Gu & Eswar Prasad & Thomas Moehrle, 2020. "New Evidence on Cyclical Variation in Average Labor Costs in the United States," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 102(5), pages 966-979, December.
    4. Verdugo, Gregory, 2016. "Real wage cyclicality in the Eurozone before and during the Great Recession: Evidence from micro data," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 46-69.
    5. Barry Eichengreen, 2021. "Gold and South Africa’s Great Depression," Economic History of Developing Regions, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(2), pages 175-193, May.
    6. Eichengreen, Barry & Park, Donghyun & Shin, Kwanho, 2016. "Deflation in Asia: Should the Dangers Be Dismissed?," ADB Economics Working Paper Series 490, Asian Development Bank.
    7. Grace Weishi Gu & Eswar Prasad, 2018. "New Evidence on Cyclical Variation in Labor Costs in the U.S," NBER Working Papers 24266, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.

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