The Wage Curve

This is a remarkable book in many ways. It has one major theme: that wages are inversely related to unemployment across areas and industries, with coefficients that are quite similar over time and among countries. There are few strong empirical reguilarities in economics. This book goes a very long way to establishing one, which is quite impressive. There are few empirical pieces in social science that so devastate an existing point of view.

Richard B. Freeman, Department of Economics, Harvard University

This book rigrously establishes the wage curve—a downward sloping relationship between the wage level and the unemployment rate—as one of the most pervasive phenomenon of modern economies. but what does it mean? Blanchflower and Oswald's attempts at explaining the wage curve will provoke much theorizing on the operation of the labor market. And this much is clear: The Wage Curve should be the starting point for all serious future work on the relationship between wages and unemployment.

Alan Krueger, Professor, Princeton University

For the past 60 years, economists have struggled with the question of whether higher unemployment raises or lowers average wages. With this book, Blanchflower and Oswald resolve an important piece of the puzzle. People who work in labor markets with higher unemployment earn a substantially lower wage. This simple fact may be as close as we come to an empirical law in modern economics.

David Card

Labour economics is in ferment [and] this book is a good point ofentry to the argument.

The Economist