The Wage Curve：（工资曲线）.pdfVIP

An Introduction to the Wage Curve June 1994 David G. Blanchflower Dartmouth College and NBER Andrew J. Oswald London School of Economics This paper draws partly upon work to be published, in the fall of 1994 by MIT Press, as a research monograph entitled The Wage Curve. The research was funded by the ESRC. Abstract This paper describes a statistical regularity or empirical law of economics. Research done in the last few years has uncovered what seems to be a negatively- sloped curve linking the wages earned by employees to the unemployment rate in their region (or industry). The curve emerges from microeconometric earnings equations estimated on international data sets that in some cases use hundreds of thousands or even millions of observations. It holds after controlling for workers personal and demographic characteristics, for regional characteristics, and for macroeconomic and other aggregate influences. The curvature of the function -- an index of wage flexibility that might be termed the unemployment elasticity of pay -- is apparently approximately the same in each of the fifteen countries in which the curve has been found. That elasticity is -0.1. An Introduction to the Wage Curve David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald The market for labor is complex. At first glance it seems to be little more than a swirl of idiosyncratic detail. Peoples wages are outwardly the product of quirk, precedent, bureaucratic convenience, luck, and historical happenstance. Institutions differ across regions and nations; shocks take diverse forms over time; notions of demand and supply seem here to come