Salaire réel, chocs technologiques et fluctuations économiques

The author presents empirical evidence that he has obtained from an analysis of the response of different economic variables, including the real wage rate, to a technology shock. He replicates Galí's (1999) bivariate model and compares dynamic impulse responses and conditional correlations with evidence provided by the vector-error-correction model that was identified using the King, Plosser, Stock, and Watson (1991) procedure. To calculate confidence intervals, the author uses Kilian's (1998) bootstrap-after-bootstrap method. The empirical evidence suggests that it is not possible to reject a procyclical real wage in response to a technology shock. Therefore, real-business-cycle models cannot be rejected based on their conditional predictions of the labour-market dynamics in favour of other types of models.