AMER.MACRO: Did Wages Become Stickier During the Interwar Period?

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                ABSTRACTS IN ECONOMIC HISTORY
                    (c) 2000 EH.Net
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Name: Ranjit S. Dighe
Email: dighe@oswego.edu
Institution: SUNY-Oswego

Co-author: Elizabeth Dunne Schmitt
Dept. of Economics
Mahar Hall
SUNY-Oswego
Oswego, NY 13126
edunne@oswego.edu

Title: Did Wages Become Stickier During the Interwar Period?

Internet Address of abstracted work:

By mail:
Ranjit S. Dighe
Economics Department, Mahar Hall
SUNY-Oswego
Oswego, NY 13126

Language: English

Abstract:
Historical studies of the cyclical behavior of wages in the United States
tend to compare pre-WWI data with post-WWII data. The interwar decades of
the 1920s and 1930s typically do not enter into these studies, partly
because of data discontinuities and partly because the post-WWI deflation
of 1920-1921 and the Great Depression of the 1930s are seen as anomalous.
Yet many scholars allege that wages became decidedly stickier at some point
during those decades, such as in the immediate aftermath of the Crash of
1929 or with the First New Deal in 1933. This paper attempts to determine
whether wages did in fact become stickier between the wars, using a
modified Phillips Curve
framework in which the monthly change in nominal hourly earnings is
regressed against current and lagged values of industrial production and
wholesale prices. Preliminary results indicate that wages became
significantly stickier in 1933, though not in 1929.

Bibliography: Dighe, Ranjit S. and Elizabeth Dunne Schmitt. "Did Wages
Become Stickier During the Interwar Period?" Working Paper, March 2000.

Subject: V
Geographical Area: 7
Country/Region: U.S.A.
Time Period: 8

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