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Journal Article
The Effect of Winter Weather on U.S. Economic Activity
The authors? findings support the view that weather has a significant, but short-lived, effect on economic activity. Except for a few industries, which are affected importantly (such as utilities, construction, hospitality and to a lesser extent retail), the effect is not very big, so that even the fairly bad weather during the 2013?14 winter cannot account entirely for the weak economy during that period. Other factors must have been at play.
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Do Cost-of-Living Shocks Pass Through to Wages?
We develop a novel, tractable New Keynesian model where firms post wages and workers search on the job, motivated by microeconomic evidence on wage setting. Because firms set wages to avoid costly turnover, the rate that workers quit their jobs features prominently in the model’s wage Phillips curve, matching U.S. empirical evidence. We then examine the response of wages to cost-of-living shocks, i.e., shocks that raise the price of household’s consumption goods but do not affect the marginal product of labor. Such shocks pass through to wages only to the extent that higher cost of living ...
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Congestion in Onboarding Workers and Sticky R&D
R&D investment spending exhibits a delayed and hump-shaped response to shocks. We show in a simple partial equilibrium model that rapidly adjusting R&D investment is costly if the probability of converting new hires into productive R&D workers (“onboarding”) is decreasing in the number of new hires (“congestion”). Congestion thus causes R&D-producing firms to slowly hire new workers in response to good shocks and hoard workers in response to bad shocks, providing a microfoundation for convex adjustment costs in R&D investment. Using novel, high-frequency productivity data on ...