More Real Wages and Productivity

As a follow up to my previous post on whether real wages have tracked productivity, here is a graph from Edward Lazear that has real compensation calculated the way suggested by Martin Feldstein:
Using this approach, real compensation does generally track productivity. Zubin Jelveh, however, notes that

health care and other fringe benefits make up a greater portion of total compensation now than in 1970. Back then, wage and salary payments made up 89.4 percent of compensation, but that figure declined to 80.9 percent by 2006 ...

Health care and other fringe benefits, then, are taking up a good portion of these real gains.

Real Wages Have Kept Up with Productivity?

Martin Feldstein has a new working paper showing that, contrary to conventional wisdom, U.S. real wages have kept up with productivity in the nonfarm business sector.

The level of productivity doubled in the U.S. nonfarm business sector between 1970 and 2006. Wages, or more accurately total compensation per hour, increased at approximately the same annual rate during that period if nominal compensation is adjusted for inflation in the same way as the nominal output measure that is used to calculate productivity.

More specifically, the doubling of productivity since 1970 represented a 1.9 percent annual rate of increase. Real compensation per hour rose at 1.7 percent per year when nominal compensation is deflated using the same nonfarm business sector output price index.

In the more recent period between 2000 and 2007, productivity rose much more rapidly (2.9 percent a year) and compensation per hour rose nearly as fast (2.5 percent a year).

[...]

The relation between wages and productivity is important because it is a key determinant of the standard of living of the employed population as well as of the distribution of income between labor and capital. If wages rise at the same pace as productivity, labor’s share of national income remains essentially unchanged. This paper presents specific evidence that this has happened: the share of national income going to employees is at approximately the same level now as it was in 1970.

Two principal measurement mistakes have led some analysts to conclude that the rise in labor income has not kept up with the growth in productivity. The first of these is a focus on wages rather than total compensation. Because of the rise in fringe benefits and other noncash payments, wages have not risen as rapidly as total compensation. It is important therefore to compare the productivity rise with the increase of total compensation rather than with the increase of the narrower measure of just wages and salaries.

The second measurement problem is the way in which nominal output and nominal compensation are converted to real values before making the comparison. Although any consistent deflation of the two series of nominal values will show similar movements of productivity and compensation, it is misleading in this context to use two different deflators, one for measuring productivity and the other for measuring real compensation.

I want to believe these findings, but they seem too good to be true. What do you think?

Are Real Wages Countercyclical, Procyclical, or Acyclical?

Eric Swanson of the San Francisco Fed provides an interesting, nuanced answer to this question using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. From his abstract:

Although real wages were procyclical across the entire distribution of workers from 1967 to 1991, the wages of lower-income, younger, and less-educated workers exhibited greater procyclicality. However, workers’ straight-time hourly pay rates have been acyclical, suggesting that more variable pay margins such as bonuses, overtime, late shift premia, and commissions have played a substantial if not primary role in generating procyclicality.

Here is a link to the paper.