The last payroll employment report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) included some relatively good news on wages. Private average hourly earnings rose an estimated 12 cents in January, the largest increase since June 2007. Even so, earnings were up only 2.2 percent over the last year versus average growth of 3.4 percent in 2007.
What accounts for the sluggish growth in average earnings? The average hourly earnings data for all workers is essentially the sum of the average earnings per hour within an industry weighted by that industry's share of employment. In this piece, Ed Lazear argues that a shift of the U.S. economy away from some high-paying industries to lower-paying industries may have contributed to dampened wage growth. Lazear specifically calls out the reduced share of employment in the relatively high-paying finance industry, at hospitals, and in the information sector as potential culprits. A shift in employment away from relatively high-wage jobs will put downward pressure on the growth in average wages.
To get some idea of the effect of industry composition on wages, I took the 2014 calendar year average wage for each industry group at the two-digit NAICS level and multiplied it by the share of employment in that industry in 2014 (admittedly, two-digit NAICS level of disaggregation is very coarse and masks a lot of potential shifts in job-types within industries). Summing across the industries gives an estimate of total average private hourly earnings in 2014. I then repeated the exercise, but using the 2007 industry shares of employment instead (see the chart).
Would average wages have been higher if we had the same mix of employment across industries as we had before the recession? The answer seems to be yes, but not much higher. If nothing had changed in the economy's industry employment mix since 2007, then average wages would have been about 12 cents higher.
This translates into a 16.8 percent increase in nominal wages between 2007 and 2014 versus a 16.2 percent increase if the actual industry employment shares where used, because the decline in the shares of employment in the relatively high paying industries Lazear cites has not been very large, and some higher-paying industries have seen growth. Moreover, some industries with below-average wages, such as retail trade, have experienced a decline in their share of employment as well.
By Whitney Mancuso, a senior economic analyst in the Atlanta Fed's research department