Nominal-contracting theories of unemployment: Evidence from panel data

Abstract

This paper examines economywide and sector-specific responses of real wages to nominal shocks using micro panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Men. The observed response patterns provide no support for nominal-contracting theories of unemployment, which predict that nominal surprises should be negatively correlated with real wages. In fact, both inflation and money-growth surprises are found to be essentially uncorrelated with real wages. Either a real-business-cycle model or a model with rigidities in commodity prices could be consistent with these results. Copyright 1993 by American Economic Association.