The Changing Cyclical Behavior of Wages and Prices, 1890-1976: Comment
评论了Sachs关于工资和价格周期行为的研究，指出其结论因使用批发价格指数而非更合适的隐含平减指数而存在偏差，并发现一个数据符号错误。
In a recent issue of this Review, Jeffrey Sachs considers the early history of inflation. In the first section of the paper he concludes: evidence is rather striking. For mild contractions, downward price flexibility seems to have ended with the pre-World War II period. For moderate and severe contractions, similarly, the response of wages and prices have fallen significantly since 1950 (p. 81). It is the contention here that those conclusions follow from the choice of a measure of price inflation. There is also a data error that slightly weakens the conclusion. My last point is that Sachs overlooked a conclusion that is pertinent to the choice of time period for his estimation of Phillips curves. The data error is first. Sachs classifies the business cycle downturn of 1918-19 as a strong contraction (Table 2, p. 81). Given that, it would be convenient to have the annual percentage change of the BLS Wholesale Price Index from peak to trough for 1918-19 be -5.5 as stated in his Table 1. Unfortunately, it is not so. The error is the sign. The observation for 1918-19 for change in price inflation in his Table 2 becomes -5.4 instead of 16.4. My second point is the choice of the measure of the general price level. Sachs writes: empirical displayed in this section are for the WPI and indexes of average hourly compensation. The calculations have also been made for a number of other price and wage series, with very similar results (p. 79).' Why choose the Wholesale Price Index? It is now quite out of style as a measure of the general price level. There is some difficulty with choosing a Consumer Price Index because there is no one series that covers the entire period. The obvious alternative to have used is the Implicit Deflator. The question is the significance of the choice. Table 1 duplicates Sachs' Table 1, but uses the Implicit Deflator rather than the Wholesale Price Index as the measure of price inflation. Sachs concludes from his table: For the WPI, the rate of inflation declined during every downturn from 1890 to and for three of the five recessions after 1948, and Almost every contraction from 1890 to 1927 produced a sharper deceleration in price change than did later recessions. Only the deceleration in 1949 is of similar magnitude with the earlier cycles (p. 80). Those statements must now be altered. The rate of inflation declined in seven of eleven downturns from 1890 to 1948. In one of these, the decline in the rate of inflation is less than one percentage point. The result is not altered for the six recessions after 1948.2 The choice of the Implicit Deflator causes the pattern to become much more complex and the 1949 deceleration much more conspicu-