The Wage Curve Across the Wealth Distribution

This paper studies the relationship between wage and unemployment rate across the wealth distribution. Using microdata from Norway covering the entire Norwegian population of residents between 2000 and 2015, we introduce four novel findings on this relationship. First, the share of unemployed individuals belonging to the bottom decile of the gross wealth distribution is tenfold larger than the share belonging to the top decile (34% and 3.2%). Second, the former moves in a specular manner to the latter. Third, the negative slope of the wage curve is confirmed. Fourth, the wage-to-unemployment ratio increases monotonically with gross wealth, and decreases monotonically with net wealth for negative values of net wealth.