Search Results
Conference Paper
The interaction of labor markets and inflation: analysis of micro data from the International Wage Flexibility Project
Inflation can ?grease? the wheels of economic adjustment in the labor market by relieving the constraint imposed by downward nominal wage rigidity, but not if there is also substantial downward real wage rigidity. At the same time, inflation can throw ?sand? in the wheels of economic adjustment by degrading the value of price signals. A number of recent studies suggest that wage rigidity is much more important for business cycles and monetary policy than previously believed (see Erceg, Henderson and Levin, 2000, Smets and Wouters, 2003, and Hall, 2005). Thus, our results on how wage rigidity ...
Briefing
What can we learn by disaggregating the unemployment-vacancy relationship?
This policy brief explores the nature of the recent change in the vacancy-unemployment relationship by disaggregating the data by industry, age, education, and duration of unemployment, and by examining blue- and white-collar groups separately.
Report
How wages change: micro evidence from the international wage flexibility project
How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals' earnings in thirty-one different data sets from sixteen countries, from which we obtain a total of 360 wage change distributions. We find a remarkable amount of variation in wage changes across workers. Wage changes have a notably non-normal distribution; they are tightly clustered around the median and also have many extreme values. Furthermore, nearly all countries show ...
Working Paper
Potential effects of the Great Recession on the U.S. labor market
The effect of the Great Recession on the U.S. labor market will likely persist even after economic output has recovered. Although the recession did not greatly change the relative probabilities of job loss for different types of workers, the long-run impact will vary by worker characteristics. Workers who lost long-term jobs during the Great Recession are at increased risk of future job loss due to the loss of protection afforded by long-term job tenure, and older displaced workers are at a relatively high risk of prolonged spells of unemployment and premature retirement. The recent increase ...
Working Paper
How wages change: micro evidence from the International Wage Flexibility Project
How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals? earnings in 31 different data sets from sixteen countries, from which we obtain a total of 360 wage change distributions. We find a remarkable amount of variation in wage changes across workers. Wage changes have a notably non-normal distribution; they are tightly clustered around the median and also have many extreme values. Furthermore, nearly all countries show ...
Conference Paper
A new method to estimate time variation in the NAIRU
NAIRU estimates are obtained from estimates of the Phillips curve, the relationship between the inflation rate on the one hand, and the unemployment rate, measures of inflationary expectations and variables representing supply shocks on the other.