from the Atlanta Fed
The Atlanta Fed’s Wage Growth Tracker came in at 3.6 percent in September, up from 3.3 percent in August and 3.4 percent in July, but the same as the 3.6 percent reading for June. By this measure, there are no obvious signs of an acceleration in wage growth for continuously employed workers during the last few months.
However, the headline wage growth tracker is a three month moving average of each month’s median wage growth. Interestingly, for September, the median wage growth (using data that are not averaged, sometimes called “unsmoothed”) was 4.2 percent, up from 3.6 percent in August, and the highest since late 2007. This pop in median wage growth can be seen in the following chart, which compares the median wage growth (smoothed using a three-month average) with the unsmoothed monthly median.
Even though this looks like a pretty large increase, the standard error on the difference between the unsmoothed August and September medians is also quite large at 0.5 percentage points. So the 0.6 percentage point difference in medians is not statistically significant – it could just as easily be sampling noise. But it is definitely something to keep an eye on going forward. As noted in a previous macroblog post, the correlation between the unemployment gap and the Wage Growth Tracker suggests that we should be seeing the wage growth tracker level off if the economy is stabilizing at full employment.
Source
http://macroblog.typepad.com/macroblog/2016/10/is-wage-growth-accelerating.html
About the Author
John Robertson is a senior policy adviser in the Atlanta Fed’s research department
