Search Results
Journal Article
The Great Recession and confidence in homeownership
Confidence in homeownership shifts for those who personally experienced real estate loss during the Great Recession. Older Americans are confident in the value of homeownership. Younger Americans are less confident.
Report
Shaping the Future of Work: Workers’ Optimism and Pessimism about AI
The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is here and is expected to transform the labor market, creating new opportunities for some workers while eliminating the jobs of others. At the end of 2024, the authors of this brief surveyed a sample of US household heads working in different industries and with different educational backgrounds to better understand how they view AI and its potential effects on their job prospects and financial well-being.
Report
Informal work in the United States: evidence from survey responses
"Informal" work refers to temporary or occasional side jobs from which earnings are presumably not reported in full to the Internal Revenue Service and which typically do not constitute a dominant or complete source of income. Perhaps the most important reason for undertaking informal work is to offset negative income and employment shocks, such as reduced hours in a formal job, stagnant wages, or involuntary unemployment. Such negative shocks affected many Americans during the Great Recession, so it is important to determine the extent to which people engaged in informal work during this ...
Report
Changing patterns in informal work participation in the United States 2013–2015
In light of the weak labor market conditions in the United States from 2008 until recently, one might have expected that participation in alternative income-generating activities, such as informal side-jobs, would have increased during that period. By the same logic, participation in informal work should have declined more recently, as conditions in the formal labor market improved. However, recent technological innovations have created a number of new opportunities for engaging in informal work. Such innovations may have promoted structural increases in informal work participation; if so we ...
Report
Relative pay, productivity, and labor supply
Relative pay ? earnings compared with the earnings of others doing a similar job, or compared with one?s earnings in the past ? affects how much individuals would like to work (labor supply) and their effort on the job; it therefore has implications for both employers and policy makers. A collection of recent studies shows that relative pay information, even when it is irrelevant, significantly affects labor supply and effort. This effect stems mainly from those who compare unfavorably, as essentially all studies find that awareness of earning less than others or less than in the past ...
Report
Wage inflation and informal work
Despite very low unemployment in the United States in recent months, wage inflation has remained modest. This paper investigates the possibility that there is hidden labor market slack in the form of informal or gig economy work, which may help explain this wage growth puzzle. Using unique data from 2015 and 2016 that we collected through the Survey of Informal Work Participation ? part of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?s Survey of Consumer Expectations ? we find indirect and direct evidence for this hypothesis. First, we find that a measure of informal labor is negatively associated ...
Briefing
Asymmetric responses to tax-induced changes in personal income: the 2013 payroll tax hike versus anticipated 2012 tax refunds
As part of the Boston Earned Income Tax Credit Coalition's free tax preparation service offered at the Boston Roxbury Resource Center between January and April 2013, 945 low-to-moderate income individuals were asked about payroll tax changes, financial planning, and their personal characteristics. Using these survey responses, the authors calculated how these individuals planned to respond to the payroll tax hike and their tax refund. The results show that their marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of the tax refund is 30 percentage points lower than their spending reaction to the tax ...
Discussion Paper
Shifting confidence in homeownership: the Great Recession
The authors study the responses to several questions related to real estate that were added to the Michigan Survey of Consumers in July and August 2011. In particular, they asked about attitudes toward renting versus buying a home, about commuting, and about how much to spend on a mortgage. By matching the results to data (at the ZIP-code level) about relative house price declines during the recent crisis, they can study the relationship between the U.S. housing crash and the attitudes of individual consumers. They find that younger respondents are relatively less confident about ...
Discussion Paper
A psychological perspective of financial panic
In spite of large number of financial crises, often depicted as episodes of financial panic, the notion of panic in financial markets is not very well understood. Many have argued that in order to understand financial crises, and in particular panic events, we need to go beyond classic economic arguments. This paper is an effort in that direction, in which we attempt to give a psychological account of panic and of panic in financial markets in particular, by discussing uncertainty, the desire for predictability and control, the illusion of control, and confidence. We suggest how one might ...
Working Paper
Affirmative action and stereotype threat
In spite of the apparent success of affirmative action (AA) in the past, many oppose such policies. Opponents argue that the cost of attaining proportional representation by preferential policies is too high, reducing the quality of selected groups and stigmatizing members of the protected class. One way in which preferential policies might harm groups they are designed to benefit is by producing stereotype threat; that is, cueing a negative stereotype may lead individuals to conform to it. AA, by definition, singles out disadvantaged groups and therefore may unintentionally remind ...