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Real wages are wages adjusted for inflation, or, equivalently, wages in terms of the amount of goods and services that can be bought. This term is used in contrast to nominal wages or unadjusted wages. Because it has been adjusted to account for changes in the prices of goods and services, real wages provide a clearer representation of an individual's wages in terms of what they can afford to buy with those wages – specifically, in terms of the amount of goods and services that can be bought. However, real wages suffer the disadvantage of not being well defined, since the amount of inflation (which can be calculated based on different combinations of goods and services) is itself not well defined. Hence real wage defined as the total amount of goods and services that can be bought with a wage, is also not defined. This is because of changes in the relative prices. Despite difficulty in defining one value for the real wage, in some cases a real wage can be said to have unequivocall

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Deep Habits, Price Rigidities and the Consumption Response to Government Spending

This paper inspects the 'deep' habits mechanism originally used by Ravn, Schmitt-Grohé and Uribe (2006) to generate the positive comovement of public and private consumption observed in many VAR studies. In their set-up, the price-elasticity of demand is pro-cyclical and it is optimal for the firm to lower the mark-up while expanding production after the fiscal shock, raising the demand for labor and the real wage. Consequently, agents substitute consumption for leisure and overcome the negative wealth effect of the fiscal expansion. Here, we show that increasing price stickiness reduces the impact of the fiscal shock on the real wage and hinders the rise of consumption. If the degree of price stickiness is high enough, consumption is crowded-out. This is in contrast to the role of price rigidities in the standard New Keynesian model where they weaken the crowding-out of consumption.

Ghent University Faculty of Economics and Business Administration Working Paper 2010/6412011

Does Austerity Go Along with Internal Devaluations

Luisa Lambertini, Christian Pröbsting

We empirically show that the austerity packages implemented in some euro area countries during 2010–2014 were only partially successful in generating internal devaluations. Countries that cut spending indeed experienced a decline in nominal wages, a real exchange rate depreciation, a fall in the relative price of non-tradables and a shift of consumption towards non-tradables, whereas we find no such evidence for countries raising consumption taxes. We show that this asymmetric response is in line with a small open economy model with GHH preferences. Moreover, the output costs of correcting current accounts were higher than anticipated because neither policy was successful in raising exports through lower prices. Instead, current account improvements were solely driven by lower imports stemming from faltering domestic demand. We provide evidence that exporters absorbed lower wages through higher markups, and show in a model with pricing to market that, had firms kept their markups constant, output costs of correcting current account imbalances would have been cut by almost one half.

Does Austerity Go Along With Internal Devaluations?

Luisa Lambertini

Cuts to government spending rather than increases in consumption taxes are statistically associated with internal devaluations in the euro area during the period 2010-2014. Countries that cut spending experienced a decline in nominal wages, rising net exports, a fall in the relative price of non-tradables and a shift of consumption towards non-tradables. We show that these patterns are generally consistent with a neoclassical small open economy model with GHH preferences. The main remaining discrepancy between model and data is a missing terms of trade response in the data: Export prices did not decline in austere countries (nor did import prices), giving rise to asymmetric expenditure switching: Current account improvements are solely driven by falls in imports rather than increasing exports.

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