Discussion Paper
The Long and Short of It: The Impact of Unemployment Duration on Compensation Growth
Abstract: How tight is the labor market? The unemployment rate is down substantially from its October 2009 peak, but two-thirds of the decline is due to people dropping out of the labor force. In addition, an unusually large share of the unemployed has been out of work for twenty-seven weeks or more—the long-duration unemployed. These statistics suggest that there remains a great deal of slack in U.S. labor markets, which should be putting downward pressure on labor compensation. Instead, compensation growth has moved modestly higher since 2009. A potential explanation is that the long-duration unemployed exert less influence on wages than the short-duration unemployed, a hypothesis we examine here. While preliminary, our findings provide some support for this hypothesis and show that models taking into account unemployment duration produce more accurate forecasts of compensation growth.
Keywords: Compensation Growth; Short-term Unemployment; Phillips Curve;
JEL Classification: E2;
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Bibliographic Information
Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of New York
Part of Series: Liberty Street Economics
Publication Date: 2014-02-12
Number: 20140212