The employment and wage effects of oil price shocks: a sectoral analysis

Michael Keane () and Eswar Prasad

No 51, Discussion Paper / Institute for Empirical Macroeconomics from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

Abstract: In this paper we use micro panel data to examine the effects of oil price shocks on employment and real wages, at the aggregate and industry levels. We also measure differences in the employment and wage responses for workers differentiated on the basis of skill level. We find that oil price increases result in a substantial decline in real wages for all workers, but raise the relative wage of skilled workers. The use of panel data econometric techniques to control for unobserved heterogeneity is essential to uncover this result, which is completely hidden in OLS estimates. While the short-run effect of oil price increases on aggregate employment is negative, the long-run effect is negligible. We find that oil price shocks induce substantial changes in employment shares and relative wages across industries. However, we find little evidence that oil price shocks cause labor to flow into those sectors with relative wage increases.

Keywords: Power resources - Prices; Wages; Employment (Economic theory) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1991
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/common/pub_detail.cfm?pb_autonum_id=49 (application/pdf)
http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/DP/DP51.pdf

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:fip:fedmem:51

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper / Institute for Empirical Macroeconomics from Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jannelle Ruswick ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).