Wage Flexibility in the United States: Lessons from the Past
对比1920年代与二战后美国的工资设定，发现1920年代工资调整更灵活，降薪更常见，而二战后降薪罕见且艰难，说明制度约束影响工资灵活性。
In another paper (forthcoming), I have contrasted wage setting in the 1920's with that of the post-World War II period. During the 1920's and early 1930's, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics published an incomplete sample of reported wage-change decisions at the establishment level. Perhaps the best way to summarize the results is to direct attention to Table 1, which presents the distribution of manufacturing wagechange decisions during 1924 and 1925, years in which consumer price inflation was, respectively, -.2 and +4.0 percent on a December-to-December basis. The table shows a wide array of wagechange decisions ranging from cuts of over 20 percent to increases of similar magnitude. This dispersion of decisions is remarkable by post-World War II standards. Moreover, the postwar evidence suggests that nominal wage cuts are a rarity, even in periods of low inflation. When they do occur, as in some recent union concessions, the cuts result from a painful negotiations process against a background of threatened or actual mass layoffs. By the 1920's, many features of modern corporate enterprise were present. But were of little significance in most sectors, including manufacturing, the result of a sustained open shop campaign by employers after World War I. There was little labor market intervention by government. Workers resented wage cuts-during periods of generalized wage cutting such reductions became important causes of strikes-but employers implemented them anyway. And when employers did not want to take the blame for wage cuts, they used company unions to negotiate reductions (Robert Dunn, 1927, pp. 21-23). In short, in the absence of or other institutional constraints, the implicit contracts offered by employers in the 1920's provided substantially more wage flexibility than existed after World War II. The wagesetting mechanisms of the 1920's did not approach the flexibility of a classical auction market, a fact of some comfort to implicitcontract theorists. However, it is unclear that one needs to go much beyond simple explanations of how wage cuts (or even relative wage slippage) would lead to worker resentment and management caution.