The full text on this page is automatically extracted from the file linked above and may contain errors and inconsistencies.
Wage Rigidity Meter
The statistics on this page offer a closer examination of the annual wage changes of U.S. workers that have not
changed jobs over the year. They include graphs of the fraction of workers receiving a wage change of zero in
several demographic subgroups of the U.S. labor force, as well as a histogram showing all of the reported wage
changes among these workers in the last four quarters. The data for these statistics are drawn from a matched
Current Population Survey dataset (see Daly, Hobijn, Wiles 2011 for details on the matching procedure). The
Current Population Survey is a monthly nationally representative survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor
Statistics. The summary statistics on this page will be updated on a quarterly frequency.
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Type of pay
Educational attainment
Selected industries
Distribution of wage changes
The above chart displays the percentage of workers who saw no change in their wage over the past year. This
statistic is calculated for all workers, for workers paid at an hourly rate, and for non-hourly workers.
Estimates of the percent of workers with a rigid wage in time series charts are averages of monthly rates taken over
a 12-month period. In the histogram and the table below, all observations over a 12-month period are pooled and
then used to calculate the percent of rigid wages. Estimates from these two methods may differ very slightly.
Distribution of Nominal Wage Changes
4-Quarter Average 2013Q4 2014Q1 2014Q2 2014Q3 2014Q4
Difference of log wage from one year prior
25th Percentile
-0.028 -0.030 -0.025 -0.023 -0.020
Median
0.017
0.017
0.019
0.020 0.022
75th Percentile
0.102
0.101
0.105
0.105
0.105
Percentage of workers reporting a wage change of zero
15.64
15.63
15.40
15.54
15.53
References
Daly, Mary C., Bart Hobijn, and Brian Lucking. 2012. Why Has Wage Growth Stayed Strong? FRBSF Economic
Letter 2012-11 (April 2).
Daly, Mary C., Bart Hobijn, and Theodore S. Wiles. 2011. Dissecting Aggregate Real Wage Fluctuations: Individual
Wage Growth and the Composition Effect FRBSF Working Paper 2011-23.
Nominal Wage Rigidity Data Release (Excel document, 66 kb)
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Contact Bart.Hobijn (at) sf.frb.org