Labor market tightness and inflation before and after the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper reviews evidence on the role of the labor market in driving inflation and analyzes the US labor market, and its contribution to inflation, during the COVID-19 pandemic and recovery. The author argues that the quits rate is a good measure of labor market tightness and is the best predictor of nominal wage growth. He further argues that wages largely pass through into prices, but other factors like sector-specific supply shocks are needed to explain the dynamics of price inflation. The COVID pandemic created large disruptions in the labor market, resulting in an increase in job openings and quits, high nominal wage growth, and temporary labor market mismatch. The shocks associated with COVID have subsequently faded, and nonlinearities in both the wage Phillips curve and Beveridge curve allowed for nominal wage growth to normalize without a large increase in unemployment. Lastly, the author argues that the relationship between wages and prices is mostly one-directional: Past price increases are not a major driver of wage gains. The period of high nominal wage growth in the recovery from COVID therefore reflected temporarily high labor demand as the economy quickly reopened, but not a classic wage-price spiral.