14 In contrast to the other wage and compensation measures, the Wage Growth Tracker only measures wage changes for individuals who had a job in both the current month and a year ago. -9growth has been quite weak in recent years, and empirical analysis suggests that it is has been holding down aggregate growth in labor compensation independent of labor utilization in recent years.
15 An analysis of the pattern of wage growth at the U.S. state level also suggests that subdued growth for the country as a whole probably reflects sluggish productivity or some other factor common to all states, because cross-state differences in wage growth are about what one would expect given cross-state differences in unemployment rates.