Wages, work intensity and unemployment in Japan, UK and USA

Abstract

This paper looks at wage inflation in the UK, the US and Japan. We focus in particular on the impact of excess labour supply. Rather than measuring excess supply of labour purely in terms of registered unemployment, we extend the usual analysis to look at the impact of excess supply of workers within the firm. As is well known, firms may 'hoard', or under utilise, labour which effectively means that, internally, more hours are supplied than demanded at given wages. Our key conclusion is that results based on recorded unemployment rates alone seriously underestimate the flexibility of real wages.