PrefBlog

The WSJ has a nice piece titled The Wage Paradox Explained:

So why haven’t wages risen faster amid an increase in hiring and unfilled jobs? One answer is that wages have actually been growing at a faster clip—around 4% to 5%—at least for full-time workers with steady jobs. But new full-time workers who are generally paid less than the retirees they replace are dragging down the average wage increase.

Researchers at the San Francisco Fed this week updated their 2016 paper that disaggregated the wages of full-time workers with steady employment from recent entrants—that is, new workers or those returning to full-time work. Their earlier analysis showed that average wage growth had slowed less than expected during the recession while staying relatively flat during the recovery.

That’s because workers who lost jobs during the recession were generally lower skilled and lower paid, so average weekly wages didn’t fall significantly. However, many of those workers have since been rehired at below-average wages, which has depressed the aggregate.

In prior expansions, wage growth has been driven mostly by continuously full-time employed workers, and the researchers find that’s still the case. Wage growth for these workers is now close to the pre-recession 2007 peak. But there are now many more workers who have been on the labor-force sidelines who are moving to full-time employment, thus creating a drag on wages.

Unfortunately, the San Francisco Fed’s website seems to have collywobbles at the moment so I can’t access the paper.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.34%, equivalent to 6.94% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long corporates now yield about 3.90%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (in this context, the “Seniority Spread”) is now about 305bp, the same as reported on August 9.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2017 at 12:05 am and is filed under Market Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.