'Have Changing Job and Worker Characteristics Restrained Wage Growth?'

John Robertson and Ellyn Terry at the Atlanta Fed's macroblog:

Have Changing Job and Worker Characteristics Restrained Wage Growth?: In the wake of the Great Recession, nominal wage growth has been subdued. But it is unclear how much of this relatively low wage growth reflects protracted weakness in the labor market versus other factors, such as changes in the composition of the workforce and jobs over time. Wage growth tends to vary across personal and job characteristics, so it stands to reason that changes in the composition of the workforce, alongside demographic and work characteristics, could be an important explanation of overall movements in wage growth.

In this post, we explore the impact of the changing mixture of worker characteristics (by age and education) and types of jobs (by industry and occupation) on the Atlanta's Fed Wage Growth Tracker. We find that composition effects do not account for the low median wage growth experienced in recent years. Holding worker and job characteristics fixed at their 1997 shares raises the median wage growth in 2014 by only about 0.2 percentage point. Our results are consistent with the analysis in a previous macroblog post, which found that changing industry-employment shares could not explain much of the sluggish growth in the average hourly earnings data from the payroll survey. ...