Article exploring the Wage-Productivity Gap of the 1980s.
creator
Ferguson, William D. (Class of 1975) (Faculty/Staff)
Title
Explaining the Rising Wage-Productivity Gap on the 1980s: Effects of Declining Employment and Unionization
supporting host
Grinnell College. Economics
Index Date
1996
Date Issued
1996
Publisher
Grinnell College
Genre
Essays
Digital Origin
born digital
Extent
40 pages
Media Type
application/pdf
description
This paper investigates causes of the dramatic increase in the wage-productivity gap and the divergence between the growth rates of aggregate productivity and real wages - in the post-1981 period. Using a two-step estimation procedure which incorporates three-digit industry wage regression coefficients into an aggregate wage growth identity equation, it finds that employment decline within unionized industries explains 18% of the post-1981 increase in the gap and that declining union ability to raise wages may explain as much as another 25%. Imports, on the other hand, do not appear to explain the gap independently of employment effects.
citation
Ferguson, William D. "Explaining the rising wage-productivity gap of the 1980s: Effects of declining employment and unionization." Review of Radical Political Economics 28.2 (1996): 77-115. ~ citation
Language
English
Topic
Employee motivation
Topic
Wages
Topic
Collective bargaining
Temporal
Nineteen eighties
Classification
HB
Related Item
Faculty Scholarship
Related Item
Scholarship at Grinnell
Related Item
Digital Grinnell
Identifier (hdl)
http://hdl.handle.net/11084/11680
Identifier (local)
grinnell:11680
Access Condition
Copyright to this work is held by the author(s), in accordance with United States copyright law (USC 17). Readers of this work have certain rights as defined by the law, including but not limited to fair use (17 USC 107 et seq.).
