This paper examines the magnitude of changes in relative wages across industries between 1860 and 1983 and analyzes the macroeconomic determinants of such changes at different intervals during this period. The variance across industries in wage growth was at least four times larger before 1948...

The conventional wisdom that nominal wages became less sensitive to the business cycle and more autocorrelated after World War II is reexamined here by considering whether these properties are artifacts of the methods used to construct prewar wage series. A replication based on these methods is...

This paper documents and analyzes changes in the wage structure across manufacturing industries over the last one hundred years. Inter-industry differentials in wages are highly stable for production workers, but autocorrelation patterns for nonproduction workers are considerably weaker....