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Working Paper
Downward nominal wage rigidity: evidence from the employment cost index
We examine the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity using the microdata underlying the BLS employment cost index--an extensive, establishment-based dataset with detailed information on wage and benefit costs. We find stronger evidence of downward nominal wage rigidity than did previous studies using panel data on individuals. Firms appear able to circumvent part, but not all, of this rigidity by varying benefits: Total compensation displays modestly less rigidity than do wages alone. Given our estimated amount of rigidity, a simple model predicts that the disinflation over the 1980s would ...
Conference Paper
The decline of fringe-benefit coverage in the 1980s
Journal Article
Effects of employer-provided severance benefits on reemployment outcomes
Surveys have shown that many employers offer severance packages to their laid-off workers and that severance pay provides substantial income for many people displaced from long-time jobs. Yet little, if anything , is known about the effects of severance pay. Does it lead people to alter the intensity of their job search or their decisions to take advantage of retraining opportunities? Does it enable them to hold out for better-paying jobs? ; The author forges new ground with this study by combining information from an administrative data base on displaced workers from Massachusetts that ...
Report
Stock market valuation indicators: is this time different?
Record low dividend yields and record high market-to-book ratios in recent months have led many market watchers to conclude that these indicators now behave differently from how they have in the past. This paper examines the relationship between traditional market indicators and stock performance, and then addresses two popular claims that the meaning of these indicators has changed in recent years. The first is that dividend yields are permanently lower now than in the past because firms have increased their use of share repurchases as a tax-advantaged substitute for dividends. The second ...
Journal Article
It's time to tax employee benefits
Working Paper
Has compensation become more flexible?
In recent years, numerous observers have argued that global competition, increased reliance on contingent workers, and the breakdown of implicit contracts have made compensation practices in the United States more flexible; in particular, employers have become more concerned with how an employee's pay compares to that in other firms and less concerned with considerations of equity or relative pay within the firm. This paper uses establishment-level data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Cost Index program to examine this claim by asking whether the variances of compensation ...
Conference Paper
The Americanization of Japanese management
Journal Article
Is there an inflation puzzle?
Why has U.S. inflation failed to accelerate despite six years of continuing economic expansion. The authors investigate whether compensation growth has played a role, either as a temporary restraint on inflation or as the underlying source of a new inflation regime. They offer two pieces of evidence suggesting that compensation growth has in fact acted as a temporary curb on rising prices. First, they show that the forecasting performance of a traditional Phillips curve model begins to break down in late 1993. When a measure of compensation growth is incorporated, however, the stability of ...
Report
Is there an inflation puzzle?
This paper investigates the issue of an "inflation puzzle", or the lack of an acceleration in inflation during the current expansion. Our findings indicate that while inflation has appeared to be unusually low, we can account for this feature of the data over most of the current expansion. In particular, the results support the view that the weak increase in compensation growth during the period 1992-94 was a major contributor to the low level of inflation observed through late 1995. ; More recently, however, there is evidence of an anomaly in the behavior of inflation. The out-of-sample ...