Wage Phillips Curve Research Articles

Likelihood-Ratio-Based Confidence Intervals for Multiple Threshold Parameters

Abstract This paper proposes the inversion of likelihood ratio tests for the construction of confidence intervals for multiple threshold parameters. Using Monte Carlo simulations, conservative likelihood-ratio-based confidence intervals are shown to exhibit empirical coverage rates at least as high as nominal levels for all threshold parameters, while still being informative in the sense of only including relatively few observations in each confidence interval. These findings are robust to the magnitude of the threshold effect, the sample size and the presence of serial correlation. Applications to existing models with multiple thresholds for U.S. real GDP growth and for the wage Phillips curve demonstrate how the proposed approach is empirically relevant to make inferences about the uncertainty of threshold estimates.

Wage–price spirals: what is the historical evidence?

AbstractHow common are wage–price spirals, and what has happened in their aftermath? We construct a new historical database of wage–price spirals—identified as episodes with consumer price inflation and average nominal wage growth rising jointly for at least a year—going back to the 1960s for a large sample of advanced economies. We find that only about a quarter of such episodes were followed by sustained accelerations in wages and prices. Instead, nominal wage growth and inflation tended to stabilize at a higher level on average, and then gradually revert, with real wage growth broadly unchanged. A decomposition of average wage dynamics during wage–price spiral episodes using a wage Phillips curve suggests that nominal wage growth normally stabilizes at levels consistent with observed inflation and labour market tightness. After historical episodes exhibiting rising inflation, falling real wages, and tightening labour markets—similar to what was observed in the early post‐COVID‐19 recovery in 2021—inflation tended to decline and nominal wage growth to rise, allowing real wages to gradually catch up. Our findings suggest that an acceleration of nominal wages against a backdrop of rising inflation does not necessarily signal that a persistent wage–price spiral dynamic is taking hold.

Optimal monetary policy and the time-dependent price and wage Phillips curves: An international comparison

We investigate the behavior of central banks in seven advanced economies, focusing on how observed monetary policies align with optimal ones as determined by model-consistent welfare measures. Our approach stands out by emphasizing the importance of inertia’s impact on the output gap and the dynamics of prices and wages. We incorporate inertia into our model using duration-dependent adjustments. By integrating this aspect into a simple New Keynesian model, our analysis aims to identify shared patterns and distinctive features in the monetary policy approach of central banks across different countries.

Beggaring Thy Co-Worker: Labor Market Dualization and the Wage Growth Slowdown in Europe

As temporary employment has become a pervasive feature of modern labor markets, reasons for wage growth have become less well understood. To determine whether these two phenomena are related, the authors investigate whether the dualized structure of labor markets affects macroeconomic developments. Specifically, they incorporate involuntary temporary workers into the standard wage Phillips curve to examine wage growth in 30 European countries for the period 2004–2017. Relying on individual-level data to adjust for a changing employment composition, their findings show, for the first time, that the incidence of involuntary temporary workers has strong negative effects on permanent workers’ wage growth, thereby dampening aggregate wage growth. This effect, which the authors name the competition effect, is particularly pronounced in countries where wage bargaining institutions are weak. The findings shed further light on the reasons for the secular slowdown of wage growth after the global financial crisis.

Is interest rate hiking a recipe for missing several goals of monetary policy—beating inflation, preserving financial stability, and keeping up output growth?

After the corona crisis, and even more so when the war in Ukraine struck, the price levels of all goods in the US and Europe rose surprisingly quickly and persistently. The FED began in March 2022 and the ECB in July 2022 with historically unique interest rate increases to combat the wage-price spiral that had not yet begun. In this article we show that energy, commodities and food were the main drivers of inflation. For this reason, central banks' goal of weakening demand for labor through historically large interest rate hikes seems unwise. We argue that the current measures cannot achieve all of their objectives: slowing inflation, stabilizing financial markets and sustaining growth. If interest rates remain high, but external forces emerge with a lasting effect and keep inflation rates high, especially in smaller emerging countries, it will be difficult to counteract this on a country or regional basis through high interest rate policy and national control of the price- and wage-Phillips curve. Significant negative side effects of interest rate hikes increase the risk of not making the necessary investments and, in particular, weaken the bargaining power of particularly vulnerable employment groups. Other tools are needed to curb inflation and keep it under control, for example more investment in sectors with supply disruptions and a massive expansion of investment in renewable energy.

Inflation stabilization and normal utilization

This paper presents a model of inflation and distribution that examines the relationship between the employment of labor and the utilization of capital. It features a structural difference between the wage Phillips curve and the price Phillips curve that gives rise to persistent changes in the real wage whenever the inflation-neutral level of activity fails to utilize the existing capital stock at its normal level. Assuming an inflation-targeting central bank that is obliged to run the system around its inflation-neutral level, these changes will reduce the gap between the inflation-neutral level and normal utilization by moving the system along a stable wage curve. In the end this implies that the inflation-neutral level of employment and full or normal utilization of capital will tendentially coincide, lending some support to the Duménil-Lévy thesis that monetary policy makes normal utilization a long-run center of gravity.

Monetary policy and the wage inflation-unemployment tradeoff

Using newly assembled data for 18 advanced economies between 1870 and 2019, I study how monetary policy affects wage inflation and unemployment and document two key findings regarding their tradeoff. First, the wage Phillips curve displays a time-varying slope. Second, the tradeoff becomes weaker in low price inflation environments due to a stronger unemployment rate and a muted wage inflation response to monetary policy. These findings lend support to the idea that monetary policy has state-dependent effects with the central banks’ ability in exploring the tradeoff being impaired by a low price inflation environment.

Postpandemic Nominal Wage Growth: Inflation Pass-Through or Labor Market Imbalance?

Measures of wage growth have increased substantially during and after the pandemic compared to their average levels in the decade before. Does higher wage growth reflect compensation for a higher cost of living, brought about by an increase in inflation in the past two years? Or has an imbalance between strong labor demand and restrained labor supply lifted wage growth? Using a new empirical wage Phillips curve model, we find that the increase in wage growth largely reflects the pass-through of higher inflation and does not reflect labor market imbalances. The model forecasts a decline in wage growth to about 3 percent annually by 2025.

Wage growth in Lithuania from 2008 to 2020: observed drivers and underlying shocks

ABSTRACT This paper studies the drivers of wage growth in Lithuania over the period 2008–2020. Using administrative data as well as aggregate measures reflecting the state of the economy, we estimate an extended version of a wage Phillips curve. Our reduced-form estimates indicate that nominal wage growth was tightly linked to labor market fluctuation over this period. Labor productivity, changes in the minimum wage, and the composition of employment also contributed to wage dynamics. However, we find little evidence that past inflation has been a push factor. To understand the underlying economic primitives behind our findings, we estimate a structural Bayesian autoregressive model. Our structural analysis reveals a significant contribution from aggregate supply shocks, reflecting a stronger relationship between productivity and wages than implied by our reduced-form estimates. Moreover, a historical decomposition reveals that since 2013, wages grew over and above productivity due to rising aggregate demand and labor market disturbances.

The Wage Phillips Curve under Labor Market Power

Using the near universe of online vacancy postings in the United States, we explore linkages between labor market power and the trade-off between unemployment and wages. We estimate the Phillips curve at the commuting zone level and find that the relationship between unemployment and wage inflation is weak in regions with high labor market power. These results help explain the flattening of the wage Phillips curve following the global financial crisis. In the context of rising interest rates, unemployment is likely to rise more in poorer US regions because labor market power is more prevalent there, thus leading to rising inequality.

A Traditional Nominal Wage Phillips Curve: Theory and Evidence

By combining simple contracting schemes with firms' optimisation, we provide theoretical underpinnings to the traditional nominal wage Phillips curve. The parameters of our Phillips curve have a structural interpretation. We extend the model to include the effect of the labour share, a factor that is absent in the new Keynesian model. Empirically we find that the unemployment parameter of the traditional model is significant, and that of the forward‐looking model is wrongly signed. Furthermore, evidence suggests that inflation targeting was accompanied by the flattening of the curve, increased anchoring of inflation expectations and a decline in worker power.

The medium-run Phillips curve: A time–frequency investigation for the UK

The debate on the inflation–unemployment relationship has focused almost exclusively on the distinction between the “short-run” and “long-run” Phillips curves, while virtually ignoring the “middle” horizons. Using a historical perspective, we show that the UK wage Phillips curve is essentially a medium-run phenomenon. At the frequency range beyond business cycle frequencies, that is 8 to 16 years, there is significant evidence of a negative and stable relationship between money wage inflation and unemployment.

Business Cycle Implications of Firm Market Power in Labor and Product Markets

In this paper, we analyze the business cycle implications of firms having oligopsony power in labor markets, as well as oligopoly power in product markets, within the context of a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with firm entry and exit. Relative to the standard setup with monopolistic competition in both goods and labor markets, the strategic interaction between intermediate goods firms in the current setup results in larger price markups as well as wage markdowns, while the slopes of the aggregate price and wage Phillips curves become flatter. These effects are strengthened in a strongly non-linear fashion as the number of firms in each sector decline. Oligopsonistic labor markets also render wage shocks expansionary, unlike in the standard setup. Results indicate that a secular increase in industry concentration would not only reduce the labor share of income, but also weaken the pass-through from firms' marginal costs to prices and from productivity increases to real wages.

Heterogeneous Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity: Foundations of a Static Wage Phillips Curve

Heterogeneous Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity: Foundations of a Static Wage Phillips Curve

When Hosios Meets Phillips: Connecting Efficiency and Stability to Demand Shocks

In an economy with frictional goods and labor markets there exist a price and a wage that implement the constrained efficient allocation. This price maximizes the marginal revenue of labor, balancing a price and a trading effect on firm revenue, and this wage trades off the benefits of job creation against the cost of turnover in the labor market. We show under bargaining over prices and wages that a double Hosios condition: (i) implements the constrained efficient allocation; (ii) also minimizes the elasticity of labor market tightness and job creation to a demand shock, and; (iii) that the relative response of wages to that of unemployment to changes in demand flattens as workers lose bargaining power, and it is steepest when there is efficient rent sharing in the goods market between consumers and producers, thereby relating changes in the slope of a wage Phillips curve to the constrained efficiency of allocations.

Time-varying wage Phillips curves in the euro area with a new measure for labor market slack

In recent years, the relationship between wage growth and the unemployment gap, known as the wage Phillips curve, has been puzzlingly weak: whereas the unemployment gap was low, wage growth was low as well. We consider two possible explanations for this ‘low wage growth puzzle’: (i) a structural change in the relationship between wage growth and labor market slack, and (ii) a failure of the unemployment gap to adequately capture labor demand conditions. We propose a new measure for labor market slack based on a survey among firms asking whether the shortage of labor is limiting production. This labor shortage indicator points to hidden slack not captured by the unemployment gap, which resolves the low wage growth puzzle. Our estimates of the wage Phillips curve for the five biggest euro area countries also suggest that the wage Phillips curve has changed over time, but not uniformly across countries.

Labour Shortages and Wage Growth

Tight labour markets are usually accompanied by mounting wage pressures. Yet, in the past decade, wage growth has remained subdued despite the appearance of widespread labour shortages. This paper re-examines labour market conditions since 2007 through the lens of a novel indicator, relative labour shortages (RLS), based on data from a large representative business survey in Sweden. Four main results emerge from the analysis: (1), the time-series average of RLS suggested much weaker labour market conditions during the 2013–2019 recovery from the Great Recession and during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 than qualitative surveys or the vacancy-unemployment ratio. (2), the reason is that RLS contains a time-varying intensive margin of labour shortages not recorded in most surveys, which has been trending downwards since the Great Recession. (3), fixed-effects regressions with several aggregate-, sector, region and establishment-level controls confirm that RLS is strongly and positively correlated with annual wage growth at the establishment level. (4), sector-level wage Phillips curves show that the subdued level of RLS can help explain the sluggish wage growth in Sweden since the Great Recession.

Missing wage inflation? Estimating the natural rate of unemployment in a nonlinear DSGE model

During the recovery from the global financial crisis, most advanced economies have experienced a surprisingly weak response of wage inflation to the decline in unemployment. In this study, we investigate whether downward wage rigidity (DWR) is the source of the flattening wage Phillips curve and the lack of wage inflation in the four advanced economies: Japan, the euro area, the UK and the US. We estimate a nonlinear New Keynesian model with asymmetric wage adjustment costs and the natural rate of unemployment. Wage adjustment costs are found to be highly asymmetric in Japan, the euro area and the UK, but not in the US. The L-shaped wage Phillips curves between wage inflation and the unemployment gap clearly emerge in these three economies. Our policy simulations present a possibility that the missing wage inflation is not a permanent phenomenon and wage inflation is likely to reappear with further improvement in the labor market. Our analysis shows the usefulness of incorporating DWR into models for understanding the background of missing wage inflation and obtaining monetary policy implications.

Market Power, NAIRU, and the Phillips Curve

We explore the relationship between unemployment and inflation in the United States (1949-2019) through both Bayesian and spectral lenses. We employ Bayesian vector autoregression (“BVAR”) to expose empirical interrelationships between unemployment, inflation, and interest rates. Generally, we do find short-run behavior consistent with the Phillips curve, though it tends to break down over the longer term. Emphasis is also placed on Phelps’ and Friedman’s NAIRU theory using both a simplistic functional form and BVAR. We find weak evidence supporting the NAIRU theory from the simplistic model, but stronger evidence using BVAR. A wavelet analysis reveals that the short-run NAIRU theory and Phillips curve relationships may be time-dependent, while the long-run relationships are essentially vertical, suggesting instead that each relationship is primarily observed over the medium-term (2-10 years), though the economically significant medium-term region has narrowed in recent decades to roughly 4-7 years. We pay homage to Phillips’ original work, using his functional form to compare potential differences in labor bargaining power attributable to labor scarcity, partitioned by skill level (as defined by educational attainment). We find evidence that the wage Phillips curve is more stable for individuals with higher skill and that higher skilled labor may enjoy a lower natural rate of unemployment.

Historical Wage Phillips Curves

The recent weakening of the inflation-unemployment tradeoff has instigated a debate on whether the New Keynesian framework has outlived its usefulness. Understanding the source of that structural change is crucial for proper monetary policy conduction. I estimate the inflation-unemployment tradeoff using newly assembled data on wages and unemployment rates for 17 advanced economies since 1870. I show that the wage Phillips curve has always been ``alive and well despite displaying a time-varying slope. Using the Phillips multiplier framework, I show that the tradeoff becomes weaker in low price inflation environments due to a muted wage inflation response to monetary policy.