Beyond this, the compensation figures in the national accounts are subject to significant revision, as illustrated by the release of new data this week that suggests hourly compensation rose only 4-1/2 percent, not 7 percent, over the past year.
Changes such as this make real-time estimates of unit labor costs and labor’s share of total income much less useful in our analyses than studies based on revised data might suggest. Finally, the existing wage data are not well suited for measuring certain concepts important to modeling and policymaking, such as marginal labor costs.