Читать книгу Out of Work - Richard K Vedder - Страница 44

As indicated above, our adjusted real wage model does an excellent job of predicting the strong labor market of this period. Our mean annual estimate of unemployment over the period of 3.4 percent is only very slightly different from the actual rate of 3.3 percent.

The only year which can even remotely resemble a high unemployment year was 1924, when unemployment reached 5 percent. The modest increase in unemployment that year reflected a large increase (5.6 percent) in hourly wages. The adjustment mechanism, however, worked well. Hourly wages stopped rising the following year. Productivity fell very slightly, but this in turn was more than offset by some increase in prices. The adjusted real wage accordingly fell in 1925, and with it, the unemployment rate.