通货膨胀与劳动力市场：自下而上的视角（英）2024

Inflation and Labor Markets: A Bottom-Up View

Introduction

• Background: U.S. inflation surged sharply in 2021-2022, peaking at 9.0% in June 2022. By August 2024, it had dropped to 2.5%, indicating a continued downward trend.
• Key Points:
  • Goods inflation peaked early 2022 and has since declined significantly.
  • Services inflation peaked in early 2023 and remains elevated.
  • The labor market remains tight, with a vacancy-to-unemployment ratio (V/U) of 1.1 in July 2024.

Key Findings

• Services Inflation and Wage Growth: The study uses proprietary microdata from Homebase, a payroll service provider for small businesses in the services sector, to analyze the relationship between service sector wage growth and services inflation at the Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) level.
• Methodology:
  • Local Projection Instrumental Variable (LP-IV) Model: Utilizes variation in labor market tightness across MSAs.
  • Vacancy-to-Unemployment Ratio (V/U): Used as a measure of labor market tightness.
• Results:
  • First Stage: A one-log-point increase in the log vacancy-to-unemployment ratio leads to a 27 percentage point increase in year-on-year service wage growth over a 10-month horizon.
  • Second Stage: A one-percentage-point increase in service sector wage growth results in a 0.32-percentage-point increase in year-on-year services inflation (excluding housing).
  • Combined Effect: A one-log-point increase in the log vacancy-to-unemployment ratio is associated with an 8.8 percentage point increase in services inflation (excluding housing) over a 10-month horizon.
  • Non-Linearity: The wage-price pass-through is higher when labor markets are tighter or the initial vacancy-to-unemployment ratio is higher.

Economic Implications

• Policy Relevance: Local labor market tightness was a key driver of inflation between Q3 2022 and Q1 2023, accounting for 68.7% of services inflation (excluding housing) across MSAs during this period.
• Phillips Curve: The price Phillips curve is steeper under tighter labor market conditions, reinforcing prior evidence from aggregate data.

Conclusion

• The study provides one of the first microdata-based estimates on the impact of service sector wage growth on services inflation through the local labor market tightness channel, highlighting the persistent effects of tight labor markets on inflation.