State-Level Evidence on the Cyclicality of Real Wages

There is considerable evidence that real wages have become more procyclical over time in the U.S. A novel explanation for this phenomenon has been recently offered by Huang, Liu, and Phaneuf (2004), HLP. They develop a model to show that, as the input-output structure of an economy becomes more sophisticated, the response of real wages to an aggregate demand shock becomes more procyclical (less countercyclical) in an environment with both sticky wages and prices. We test the basic prediction of their model using state-level data in the U.S. We exploit the fact that the economies of individual states in the U.S. exhibit a range of input-output structures in the production process. This variation allows us to examine how the cyclical response of real wages to aggregate monetary policy varies with production structure in order to test the HLP hypothesis. We find strong support for the hypothesis. Our direct empirical test complements the evidence provided by HLP in their original paper.