Search Results
Journal Article
Wage Growth after the Great Recession
Nominal wage growth since the Great Recession has been sluggish. We show that the sluggishness is due mostly to weak growth in labor productivity, as well as lower-than-expected inflation. We also find that wage growth since late 2014 has actually been above what would be consistent with realized labor-productivity growth and inflation, and this trend in wages reflects an increase in labor?s share of income. We show evidence that this increase in the labor share may be due to a reversal of the trend to replace labor with capital.
Working Paper
Search, Matching and Training
We estimate a partial and general equilibrium search model in which firms and workers choose how much time to invest in both general and match-specific human capital. To help identify the model parameters, we use NLSY data on worker training and we match moments that relate the incidence and timing of observed training episodes to outcomes such as wage growth and job-to-job transitions. We use our model to offer a novel interpretation of standard Mincer wage regressions in terms of search frictions and returns to training. Finally, we show how a minimum wage can reduce training opportunities ...
Working Paper
Composition-Adjusted Wage Growth: A Robust Measure from Microdata
Wage growth is a key indicator of labor market conditions, but common measures often conflate individual wage changes with shifts in workforce composition. This paper develops a composition-adjusted measure of wage growth using nonparametric decomposition and program evaluation methods. The adjusted measure tracks unadjusted growth in stable periods but diverges during disruptions: during the Covid-19 pandemic, wage growth falls from 12% to 6% after adjustment. The method accommodates rich covariates, is robust to data quality issues such as rounding, heaping and top-coding, and enables ...