Wage Increases Do Not Signal Impending Inflation

When the FOMC meets over the next two days, they will surely be looking for signs of impending inflation. Even though actual inflation is below target, any hint that pressure is building will be seized upon by more hawkish committee members as impetus for an earlier rate rise. The relatively strong May jobs report and uptick in nominal wage inflation are likely to draw attention in this respect.

Hopefully the FOMC members are aware of new research by two of the Fed's own economists, Ekaterina Peneva and Jeremy Rudd, on the passthrough (or lack thereof) of labor costs to price inflation. The research, which fails to find an important role for labor costs in driving inflation movements, casts doubts on wage-based explanations of inflation dynamics in recent years. They conclude that "price inflation now responds less persistently to changes in real activity or costs; at the same time, the joint dynamics of inflation and compensation no longer manifest the type of wage–price spiral that was evident in earlier decades."

Peneva and Rudd use a time-varying parameter/stochastic volatility VAR framework which lets them see how core inflation responds to a shock to the growth rate of labor costs at different times. The figure below shows how the response has varied over the past few decades. In 1975 and 1985, a rise in labor cost growth was followed by a rise in core inflation, but in recent decades, both before and after the Great Recession, there is no such response:

Peneva and Rudd do not take a strong stance on why wage-price dynamics appear to have changed. But their findings do complement research from Yash Mehra in 2000, who suggests that "One problem with this popular 'cost-push' view of the inflation process is that it does not recognize the influences of Federal Reserve policy and the resulting inflation environment on determining the causal influence of wage growth on inflation. If the Fed follows a non-accommodative monetary policy and keeps inflation low, then firms may not be able to pass along excessive wage gains in the form of higher product prices." Mehra finds that "Wage growth no longer helps predict inflation if we consider subperiods that begin in the early 1980s...The period since the early 1980s is the period during which the Fed has concentrated on keeping inflation low. What is new here is the finding that even in the pre- 1980 period there is another subperiod, 1953Q1 to 1965Q4, during which wage growth does not help predict inflation. This is also the subperiod during which inflation remained mostly low, mainly due to monetary policy pursued by the Fed."