Why did we think wages are rigid for all those years?

See-Yu Chan, Stephan Hobler, Thijs van Rens

This is a good example of Do the simplest thing that works — the paper essentially removes workers from the earnings distribution that report full dollar or half dollar earnings in their hourly or weekly wages, and then re-estimates the distribution of wage changes. While this is far from a bulletproof approach to accounting for measurement error, it’s extremely simple and just kind of makes sense.


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