From the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Macroblog, Nov. 15:
The Atlanta Fed's Wage Growth Tracker is a three-month average of median growth in the hourly earnings of a sample of wage and salary workers taken from the Current Population Survey
. Last month in a macroblog post, I noted
that the Wage Growth Tracker reading for September, at 3.6 percent, was
close to where it had been hovering since April. However, I also noted
that the non-averaged median wage growth for September was at a cyclical
high of 4.2 percent, and so it would be interesting to see what the
October data revealed. Well, the October data are in, and they do
confirm a sizeable uptick in wage growth over the last couple of months.
The median wage growth for October was 4.0 percent, which brings the
Wage Growth Tracker up to 3.9 percent—a percentage point higher than a
year ago, and now the highest level since November 2008.
In addition, nominal wage rigidity, as measured by the fraction of
workers reporting no change in their hourly rate of pay from 12 months
earlier, declined to 13 percent—the lowest since April 2008.
The rise depicted by the Wage Growth Tracker is consistent with the recent trend in average hourly earnings from the payroll survey (up 2.8 percent from a year earlier in October—the fastest pace since June 2009)....MORE
