With consumer price index (CPI) inflation reaching almost 9% and average nominal wage growth soaring to 6.4% during 2022, many households experienced both rising wages and a rising cost of living, which was documented in “Nominal Wage Growth at the Individual Level in 2022,” our first blog post in this two-part series. The difference between these two values determines real wage growth, which has been consistently positive over the last decade but dipped into negative values in early 2021 and throughout 2022. In our previous post, we explored the first value that contributes to real wage growth—nominal wage ... (full story)