A New Empirical Investigation of Employment, Wages and Output -A Comparative Study of the US and Japan-

In this paper, I pursue an empirical analysis of different patterns of employment and wage adjustments to demand changes for the US and Japan. Analyzed are the data in the 70's and 80's, the period that the two countries are believed to show most conspicuous diverging patterns. Using the framework of cointegration and error correction, I establish that in the US it is employment level, while in Japan it is wages, that is more responsive to output fluctuations both in the long run and the short run. All the comparisons on the long run relationships are estimated and tested based on the system cointegrating regressions, and the transition from the short run to the long run responses are investigated using impulse response analysis of the error correction models. I also study differences across genders and establishment sizes within each country. For males and females in Japan, the adjustments are significantly different both in the long run and the short run, but for the firms of different sizes they diverge only in the short run. In contrast to some of the earlier work, the gender effect turns out to be insignificant in the US.