New Evidence on Cyclical Variation in Average Labor Costs in the United States

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Gu, Grace Weishi; Prasad, Eswar; Moehrle, Thomas
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Santa Cruz; Cornell University; Brookings Institution; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6535
• DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_00863
• 发表日期: 2020-12
• 页码: 966-979
• 关键词: employer-employee matches; real wage cyclicality; business-cycle; INEQUALITY; panel

摘要

We provide new evidence on the cyclicality of employers' real labor costs using BLS establishment job data for the 1982-2018 period. Average straight-time wages have become countercyclical since the financial crisis and the subsequent Great Recession. So have benefit expenditures and overall labor costs, as well as major benefit expenditures, including health insurance and Social Security. Consistent with prior literature, we find that total earnings-the sum of straight-time wages, bonuses, and overtime earnings-were procyclical before 2008; even earnings have become countercyclical since then. The increasing countercyclicality of labor costs is largely attributable to periods with below-trend GDP.