A European type wage equation from an American type labour market : some evidence from a panel of Norwegian manufacturing industries in the 1930s

摘要

Using a newly constructed panel of manufacturing industry data for interwarNorway, we estimate a long-run wage curve for the 1930s that has all the modernfeatures of being homogeneous in prices, proportional to productivity, and havingan unemployment elasticity of -0.1. This result is more typical of contemporaryEuropean than U.S. wage equations, even if the labour market in interwar Norwaypossessed distinctively more American type features than those associated withpresent-day European welfare states. We also present some new Monte Carlo evidence on the properties of the estimators used.