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Journal Article
The Winners and Losers from Trade
Although increased international trade is widely viewed as beneficial to the economies of the participating countries, the benefits are not distributed evenly across individuals within those countries, and indeed some individuals may bear a cost. We discuss two channels through which trade can affect individuals differently depending on their skill and income levels and assess the combined impact of those channels. We find that the effects of trade on the labor market and the effects of trade on prices go in opposite directions and are of similar magnitude.
Journal Article
New Data on Wealth Mobility and Their Impact on Models of Inequality
Using data on families? wealth over time, we calculate changes in relative wealth mobility; that is, how likely families are to move up or down the wealth distribution, relative to one another. We find families have become less likely to change their position in the wealth distribution over time, and those that do move are less likely to go very far. We also look at the savings behaviors that are associated with more mobile families and find that families that make large movements through the wealth distribution appear to be more likely to own some form of a risky asset.
Journal Article
Behavior of a New Median PCE Measure: A Tale of Tails
We introduce two new measures of trend inflation, a median PCE inflation rate and a median PCE excluding OER inflation rate, and investigate their performance. Our analysis indicates that both perform comparably to other simple trend inflation estimators such as the trimmed-mean PCE. Furthermore, we find that the performance of the median PCE is related to skewness in the distribution of cross-sectional growth rates across categories in the PCE, and our results suggest that the Bowley skewness statistic may be useful in forecasting.
Journal Article
Why Do Economists Still Disagree over Government Spending Multipliers?
Public debate about the effects of government spending heated up after record-large stimulus packages were enacted to address the fallout of the fi nancial crisis. Almost as noticeable as the discord was the absence of consensus among prominent economists on the issue. While it seems a simple problem to estimate the effect of government spending on output?the size of the government multiplier?it is anything but.
Journal Article
Time-consistent rules in monetary and fiscal policy
The intended effects of a government policy can be distorted by the public?s expectations about how strictly it will be enforced. If households and businesses cannot be certain that a policy will remain unchanged over its scheduled tenure, they will adjust their response to it to reflect this uncertainty. One way of mitigating the uncertainty is to add rules to new policies when they are enacted that would make altering the policies very difficult in the future.
Journal Article
Reducing the federal deficit: approaches in some other countries
The United States is not the first advanced modern economy to face a serious federal budget challenge. A number of countries have seen their debt rise to unacceptable levels in recent decades, and they have taken steps to rein it in. We explore the approaches that Canada and the United Kingdom have used. Though there are important differences in approaches and countries, we draw five useful lessons for the reforms that may be proposed in the U.S. as it addresses its fiscal challenges.
Journal Article
Income Inequality Matters, but Mobility Is Just as Important
Concerns about rising income inequality are based on comparing income distributions over time. It is important to remember that such distributions are snapshots of a single year, and that the same households do not necessarily appear year after year in the same quintile of the distribution. Paying attention to mobility, as well as inequality, gives us a richer picture of the income possibilities for households over time. We document changes in a measure of income mobility over the past 40 years, a period in which income inequality has increased. We find a modest level of movement through the ...
Journal Article
Zero Growth and Long-Run Inequality
Using a basic model to study both wealth and income inequality and their relations to long-run economic growth may lead to questionable conclusions. We consider a more complex model that includes realistic variation in the levels of income and wealth across households in addition to a new ingredient, luck in each household?s labor productivity. Using this model,we determine that existing estimates of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor are generally far away from the region where inequality would explode if long-run growth were zero.
Journal Article
What Is Behind the Persistence of the Racial Wealth Gap?
Most studies of the persistent gap in wealth between whites and blacks have investigated the large gap in income earned by the two groups. Those studies generally concluded that the wealth gap was ?too big? to be explained by differences in income. We study the issue using a different approach, capturing the dynamics of wealth accumulation over time. We find that the income gap is the primary driver behind the wealth gap and that it is large enough to explain the persistent difference in wealth accumulation. The key policy implication of our work is that policies designed to speed the closing ...
Journal Article
Why Are Headline PCE and Median PCE Inflations So Far Apart?
Mean (or headline) PCE inflation has typically fallen below median PCE inflation, and since 2012 the difference has been large. To understand the reasons for this trend, we investigate which components of the headline measure are contributing to the difference. We find that energy components, which frequently undergo wide price swings, and electronics, which have been steadily decreasing in price for decades, explain most of the difference between the two inflation measures. We argue that the outsized impacts of such components on headline PCE inflation reinforce the need for policymakers to ...