New Evidence on Cyclical Variation in Average Labor Costs in the United States
利用1982-2018年美国劳工统计局的企业数据，发现金融危机后平均标准工时工资、福利支出和总劳动力成本从顺周期转为逆周期，总收益也呈现逆周期特征。
We provide new evidence on the cyclicality of employers' real labor costs using BLS establishment job data for the 1982–2018 period. Average straight-time wages have become countercyclical since the financial crisis and the subsequent Great Recession. So have benefit expenditures and overall labor costs, as well as major benefit expenditures, including health insurance and Social Security. Consistent with prior literature, we find that total earnings—the sum of straight-time wages, bonuses, and overtime earnings—were procyclical before 2008; even earnings have become countercyclical since then. The increasing countercyclicality of labor costs is largely attributable to periods with below-trend GDP.