17.2.10
Salarios e ciclo economico
As empresas variam os salarios dos trabalhadores que contratam ao longo do ciclo economico? Trata-se de um aspecto importante para compreender as proprias flutuacoes economicas.
O meu trabalho "Measuring What Employers Really Do about Entry Wages over the Business Cycle" (co-autores Gary Solon e Jonathan Thomas), publicado esta semana como IZA Discussion Paper 4757, aborda esta questao. Os resultados, baseados no sector privado em Portugal entre 1982 e 2007, indicam que os salarios de entrada nas empresas sao bastante variaveis, ao contrario do que e' assumido em varios modelos teoricos.
Abstract:
"In models recently published by several influential macroeconomic theorists, rigidity in the real wages that firms pay newly hired workers plays a crucial role in generating realistically
large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment. There is remarkably little evidence, however, on
whether employers’ hiring wages really are invariant to business cycle conditions. We review
the small empirical literature and show that the methods used thus far are poorly suited for
identifying employers’ wage practices. We propose a simpler and more relevant approach –
use matched employer/employee longitudinal data to identify entry jobs and then directly
track the cyclical variation in the real wages paid to workers newly hired into those jobs. We
illustrate the methodology by applying it to data from an annual census of employers in
Portugal over the period 1982-2007. We find that real entry wages in Portugal over this
period tend to be about 1.8 percent higher when the unemployment rate is one percentage
point lower. Like most recent evidence on other aspects of wage cyclicality, our results
suggest that the cyclical elasticity of wages is similar to that of employment."
As empresas variam os salarios dos trabalhadores que contratam ao longo do ciclo economico? Trata-se de um aspecto importante para compreender as proprias flutuacoes economicas.
O meu trabalho "Measuring What Employers Really Do about Entry Wages over the Business Cycle" (co-autores Gary Solon e Jonathan Thomas), publicado esta semana como IZA Discussion Paper 4757, aborda esta questao. Os resultados, baseados no sector privado em Portugal entre 1982 e 2007, indicam que os salarios de entrada nas empresas sao bastante variaveis, ao contrario do que e' assumido em varios modelos teoricos.
Abstract:
"In models recently published by several influential macroeconomic theorists, rigidity in the real wages that firms pay newly hired workers plays a crucial role in generating realistically
large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment. There is remarkably little evidence, however, on
whether employers’ hiring wages really are invariant to business cycle conditions. We review
the small empirical literature and show that the methods used thus far are poorly suited for
identifying employers’ wage practices. We propose a simpler and more relevant approach –
use matched employer/employee longitudinal data to identify entry jobs and then directly
track the cyclical variation in the real wages paid to workers newly hired into those jobs. We
illustrate the methodology by applying it to data from an annual census of employers in
Portugal over the period 1982-2007. We find that real entry wages in Portugal over this
period tend to be about 1.8 percent higher when the unemployment rate is one percentage
point lower. Like most recent evidence on other aspects of wage cyclicality, our results
suggest that the cyclical elasticity of wages is similar to that of employment."
PS-Tambem disponivel como NBER Working Paper 15767.
