The world has experienced rapid productivity growth in the last three decades, but has this growth reflected in wages? In theory, under certain conditions, workers earn their marginal product so that productivity growth feeds into wages on a one-to-one basis. Given the contradictory literature,...

In their 1993 book, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway contend that US unemployment during the twentieth century can be largely explained by movements in the "adjusted real wage rate", that is, the real hourly wage rate divided by labor productivity. In particular, the authors suggest that...