September 05, 2014
Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen is a serious scholar of economics. That means that she wants to hear a range of arguments and consider them carefully. Unfortunately we don’t live in a political world where such concern with the truth is the norm.
For this reason it is unfortunate that Yellen speculated in her Jackson Hole speech last month that one reason for weak wage growth could be pent-up real wage declines. The argument is that if we think that firms would have lowered real wages, but could not because they did not want to impose nominal wage cuts, then there should be a number of workers whose real wages are higher than is justified by their productivity.
The implication of this story is that when labor markets tighten, these workers will initially see no nominal increase in wages since it will take some time for their real wages to fall to a level in line with productivity. But then we get a story where we end this pent-up wage decline and then these workers would again see nominal wage growth. This is then presented as a kicker to inflation.
It’s reasonable for Yellen to consider such issues, but naturally the inflation hawks are seeing this story as yet another argument for slamming down brakes on the economy and job growth. Most of us would believe as a fairly simple story that in a tighter labor market there is more upward pressure on wages and therefore somewhat more risk of inflation. But how is this changed by the pent-up wage decline story?
What percent of the workforce do we think can be in this boat, 5 percent, 10 percent, 20 percent? It seems hard to imagine it would be much over 10 percent of the workforce that could conceivably be in this situation, especially when we consider that 4 million workers, roughly 3 percent of the workforce, leave their jobs every month.
But let’s say that we have 10 percent of the workforce who have some degree of pent-up wage declines. The issue is what happens when this ends? The first thing we have to remember is that the pent-up declines won’t end all at once. Workers would have different degrees of pent-up wage declines.
Let’s say that the pent-up declines end over 3 years. This means that in each of those three years, if we start from our 10 percent number, 3.3 percent of the workforce suddenly goes from seing zero nominal wage increases to seeing 2.0 percent pay hikes in order to have their wages keep pace with inflation. And this raises the overall rate of inflation by 0.07 percentage points. Get out the wheelbarrows of money, hyperinflation is just around the corner.
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