Search Results
Working Paper
Firms' wage adjustments: a break from the past?
The authors examine 39 years of wage data for workers in mobile occupations within a set of employers in three midwestern cities. They study wage changes during years of rising, falling, and steady inflation to identify regularities that could broaden understanding of the inflationary process at the micro level.
Journal Article
Urban dynamics in New York City: conference overview and summary of papers
These articles were presented at a conference organized by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in April 2005, "Urban Dynamics in New York City." The goal of the conference was threefold: to examine the historical transformations of the engine-of-growth industries in New York and distill the main determinants of the city's historical dominance as well as the challenges to its continued success; to study the nature and evolution of immigration flows into New York; and to analyze recent trends in a range of socioeconomic outcomes, both for the general population and recent immigrants more ...
Report
Turbulent firms, turbulent wages?
Has greater turbulence among firms fueled rising wage instability in the United States? Earlier research by Gottschalk and Moffitt shows that rising earnings instability was responsible for one-third to one-half of the rise in wage inequality during the 1980s. These growing transitory fluctuations remain largely unexplained. To help fill this gap, this paper further documents the recent rise in transitory fluctuations in compensation and investigates its linkage to the concurrent rise in volatility of firm performance documented in research by Comin and Mulani and others. ; After examining ...
Journal Article
Live long and prosper: challenges ahead for an aging population
Over the next thirty years, the percentage of people who are 65 and over will grow rapidly while the percentage of people in their working years will decline. This shift in the age distribution of the population will put enormous pressure on social security systems in the United States, Germany, and Japan as the number of workers whose payroll taxes fund each retiree drops sharply.
Report
American employer salary surveys and labor economics research: issues and contributions
This paper reviews the uses of U.S. employer salary surveys for labor market research. Recent computational, theoretical, and econometric advances render these surveys ripe for exploitation. It summarize theories of employer wage effects and then describe salary surveys and their preparation for analysis. Then, the surveys and the methodological issues they raise are contrasted with household data. Finally, the paper summarizes the techniques used and contributions made in some salary survey-based studies.
Working Paper
HRM policy and increasing inequality in a salary survey
A look at the implications for human resource management of the rising wage disparity found in a three-decades-long private salary survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Journal Article
Economic restructuring in New York State
When economic activity slows down, labor markets may undergo extensive structural change-the permanent reallocation of workers across industries. Job losses can be heavy, and creating new jobs and retraining displaced workers to fill them can take time. A high degree of restructuring may help to explain why New York State's most recent downturn persisted for well over two years. Subseries: Second District Highlights.
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 ...
Working Paper
Macro- and microeconomic consequences of wage rigidity
An exploration of the micro- and macroeconomic theories, implications, and evidence of wage rigidity from the perspective of human resource managers and economic researchers, showing that human resource policies can subtly alter the rigidity of wages.