Wages and Productivity: Structural Changes are Crucial to Understand

Natalie Denby and Blu Putnam

Chapter 6 in Economics Gone Astray, 2019, pp 69-79 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: Despite a tight labor market, wage and productivity growth remained low in the US in the post-Great Recession decade. Nominal hourly average wages rose by 2.6% in the US between 2016 and 2017, on par with post-Recession performance. Labor productivity growth averaged only 1.1% between 2007 and 2016. Between 1995 and 2007, by contrast, the average growth rate was 2.5%. Although cyclical factors may be partially to blame, there are several key structural features of the US economy contributing to diminished growth. Wage and productivity growth have been held back by persistently low inflation expectations, workforce demographics, and the shift in the payrolls distribution in the economy in favor of lower-wage sectors…

Keywords: Economics; Macroeconomics; Monetary Policy; Fiscal Policy; Inflation; Risk Management; Federal Reserve; Quantitative Easing; Taylor Rule (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E02 E44 E52 E6 G32 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9781944659592_0006 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9781944659592_0006 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:wschap:9781944659592_0006

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().