How sticky are wages in nominal terms?

 There is a new paper on this topic, with what seems to be very good data: This paper examines the relationship between downward nominal wage rigidity and employment outcomes using linked employer-employee data. Wage rigidity prevents 27.1 percent of counterfactual wage cuts, with a standard deviation of 19.2 percent across establishments. An establishment with the
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There is a new paper on this topic, with what seems to be very good data:

This paper examines the relationship between downward nominal wage rigidity and employment outcomes using linked
employer-employee data. Wage rigidity prevents 27.1 percent of counterfactual wage cuts, with a standard deviation of 19.2 percent across establishments. An establishment with the sample-average level of wage rigidity is predicted to have a 3.3 percentage point higher layoff rate, a 7.4 percentage point lower quit rate, and a 2.0 percentage point lower hire rate. Estimating a structural model by indirect inference implies that the cost of a nominal wage cut is 33 percent of an average worker’s annual compensation.

That is by Gabriel Ehrlich and Joshua Montes, recently published in American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.  Here are less gated versions of the paper.  I found this of particular interest:

Establishments in the construction supersector display the least wage rigidity, with an average of 8.8 percent of wage cuts prevented. Establishments in the public administration and finance supersectors display the most wage rigidity, with average levels of 39.3 and 41.7 percent of wage cuts prevented, respectively.

Of course employment in the construction sector is highly cyclical, and employment in public administration often is governed by tenure, not exactly what fits best into the standard story.

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 Data Source, Economics, Uncategorized