Economics
Why Your Wages Could Be Depressed for a Lot Longer Than You Think
Even with a pickup in economic growth, weak productivity and other forces may hold down wage gains in the future
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As if watching your paycheck stagnate for the last couple years hasn't been bad enough, Federal Reserve researchers are out with more (potentially) bad news: Unless we get some big shifts in global economic forces, your wages could be weak for a while.
Longer-term changes including soft productivity growth and labor's declining share of income are at the heart of the problem, Filippo Occhino and Timothy Stehulak at the Cleveland Fed find. These two macroeconomic shifts, which result from broad themes such as globalization and technology, are felt all the way down to the U.S. worker.