published as 'Real earnings and business cycles: new evidence' in: Empirical Economics, 2009, 37 (1), 51-71
In the time domain, the observed cyclical behavior of the real wage hides a range of economic influences that give rise to cycles of differing lengths and amplitudes. This may serve to produce a distorted picture of wage cyclicality. Here, we employ frequency domain methods that allow us decompose wages into cyclical components and to assess the relative contribution of each component. These are discussed in relation to wages alone (the univariate case) and to wages in relation to production or employment-based measures of the cycle (multivariate). In the multivariate dimension, we derive methods for determining whether (i) wage and business cycles cohere (ii) lead-lag or contemporaneous relationships exist and (iii) the degree of coherency between wage and business cycles is time dependent. We establish that real wages are strongly procyclical and that the business cycle is the dominant associated influence.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.