NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

International Wage Curves

David G. Blanchflower, Andrew J. Oswald

NBER Working Paper No. 4200*
Issued in October 1992
NBER Program(s):   LS

The paper provides evidence for the existence of a negatively sloped locus linking the level of pay to the rate of regional (or industry) unemployment. This "wage curve" is estimated using microeconomic data for Britain, the US, Canada, Korea, Austria, Italy, Holland, Switzerland, Norway, and Germany, The average unemployment elasticity of pay is approximately -0.1. The paper sets out a multi-region efficiency wage model and argues that its predictions are consistent with the data.

*Published: This paper was subsequently published as International Wage Curves, David G. Blanchflower, Andrew Oswald, in NBER book Differences and Changes in Wage Structures (1995)
Differences and Changes in Wage Structures, ed. Katz and Freeman, University of Chicago Press, 1995

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