Revisiting Real Wage Rigidity
提供实证证据表明实际工资刚性并非失业波动的主要原因，并指出理论与实证文献对实际工资刚性的定义存在偏差，平均化处理会低估其对生产率冲击的响应。
Abstract In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that real wage rigidity is not a major cause of unemployment volatility. We argue that there is a disconnect between the theoretical and empirical literatures on this topic. While theoretical studies define real wage rigidity as the response of wages to changes in unemployment following productivity shocks, the empirical literature measures real wage rigidity as the estimated semi‐elasticity of wages with respect to unemployment, averaged over all shocks. We show that averaging over shocks gives a biased measure of real wage rigidity, as the impact of other shocks confounds the response to productivity shocks. Our results indicate that the estimated semi‐elasticity with respect to productivity shocks is twice as large as the estimated semi‐elasticity averaged over all shocks. This implies that one cannot attribute unemployment volatility to real wage rigidity.