Measuring What Employers Really Do About Entry Wages Over the Business Cycle

38 Pages Posted: 22 Feb 2010 Last revised: 30 Jan 2023

See all articles by Pedro S. Martins

Pedro S. Martins

Nova School of Business and Economics; IZA Institute of Labor Economics; Global Labor Organization (GLO)

Gary Solon

University of Arizona; National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

Jonathan Thomas

University of Edinburgh - Economics; CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute)

Multiple version iconThere are 2 versions of this paper

Date Written: February 2010

Abstract

In models recently published by several influential macroeconomic theorists, rigidity in the real wages that firms pay newly hired workers plays a crucial role in generating realistically large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment. There is remarkably little evidence, however, on whether employers' hiring wages really are invariant to business cycle conditions. We review the small empirical literature and show that the methods used thus far are poorly suited for identifying employers' wage practices. We propose a simpler and more relevant approach - use matched employer/employee longitudinal data to identify entry jobs and then directly track the cyclical variation in the real wages paid to workers newly hired into those jobs. We illustrate the methodology by applying it to data from an annual census of employers in Portugal over the period 1982-2007. We find that real entry wages in Portugal over this period tend to be about 1.8 percent higher when the unemployment rate is one percentage point lower. Like most recent evidence on other aspects of wage cyclicality, our results suggest that the cyclical elasticity of wages is similar to that of employment

Suggested Citation

Martins, Pedro S. and Solon, Gary and Thomas, Jonathan P., Measuring What Employers Really Do About Entry Wages Over the Business Cycle (February 2010). NBER Working Paper No. w15767, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1556131

Pedro S. Martins (Contact Author)

Nova School of Business and Economics ( email )

Campus de Carcavelos
Rua da Holanda, 1
Carcavelos, 2775-405
Portugal

IZA Institute of Labor Economics

P.O. Box 7240
Bonn, D-53072
Germany

Global Labor Organization (GLO) ( email )

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Germany

Gary Solon

University of Arizona ( email )

Department of Economics
Eller College of Management
Tucson, AZ 85719
United States

National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)

1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States

Jonathan P. Thomas

University of Edinburgh - Economics ( email )

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Edinburgh, EH8 9JY, Scotland
United Kingdom
+44 131 650 4515 (Phone)
+44 131 650 4514 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~jpt/

CESifo (Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute)

Poschinger Str. 5
Munich, DE-81679
Germany

HOME PAGE: http://www.cesifo.de

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