Description/Abstract

Blanchflower and Oswald (1994) reported that they have found an 'empirical law of economics'--the Wage Curve. Our paper reconsiders the western German Wage Curve using disaggregated regional data and is based on almost one million employees drawn from the Federal Employment Services of Germany over the period 1980-2004. We find that the wage equation is highly autoregressive but far from unit root. The unemployment elasticity is significant but relatively small: only between -0.02 and -0.04. We also check the sensitivity of this elasticity for different population groups (young versus old, men versus women, less educated versus highly educated, German native versus foreigner), confirming that it is stronger the weaker the bargaining power of the particular group.

Document Type

Working Paper

Date

2008

Keywords

Wage curve, regional labor markets, Phillips curve, panel data

Language

English

Series

Working Papers Series

Disciplines

Labor Economics

Additional Information

Working paper no. 103

Harvest from RePEc at http://repec.org

Source

Metadata from RePEc

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.