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Journal Article
On the aggregate labor supply
Working Paper
Do technological improvements in the manufacturing sector raise or lower employment?
We find that technology's effect on employment varies greatly across manufacturing industries. Some industries exhibit a temporary reduction in employment in response to a permanent increase in TFP, whereas far more industries exhibit an employment increase in response to a permanent TFP shock. This raises serious questions about existing work that finds that a labor productivity shock has a strong negative effect on employment. There are tantalizing and interesting differences between TFP and labor productivity. We argue that TFP is a more natural measure of technology because labor ...
Working Paper
Understanding how employment responds to productivity shocks in a model with inventories
Whether technological progress raises or lowers aggregate employment in the short run has been the subject of much debate in recent years. Using a simple model of industry employment, we show that cross-industry differences of inventory holding costs, demand elasticities, and price rigidities potentially all affect employment decisions in the face of productivity shocks. In particular, the employment response to a permanent productivity shock is more likely to be positive the less costly it is to hold inventories, the more elastic industry demand is, and the more flexible prices are. Using ...
Working Paper
Non-stationary hours in a DSGE model
The time series fit of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) models often suffers from restrictions on the long-run dynamics that are at odds with the data. Relaxing these restrictions can close the gap between DSGE models and vector autoregressions. This paper modifies a simple stochastic growth model by incorporating permanent labor supply shocks that can generate a unit root in hours worked. Using Bayesian methods we estimate two versions of the DSGE model: the standard specification in which hours worked are stationary and the modified version with permanent labor supply shocks. ...
Working Paper
Labor-Market Uncertainty and Portfolio Choice Puzzles
The standard theory of household-portfolio choice is hard to reconcile with the following facts: (i) Households hold a small amount of equity despite the higher average rate of return. (ii) The share of risky assets increases with the age of the household. (iii) The share of risky assets is disproportionately larger for richer households. We develop a life-cycle model with age-dependent unemployment risk and gradual learning about the income profile that can address all three puzzles. Young workers, on average asset poor, face larger labor-market uncertainty because of high unemployment risk ...
Working Paper
Productivity, employment, and inventories
Marshall made at least four contributions to the classical quantity theory. He endowed it with his Cambridge cash-balance money-supply-and-demand framework to explain how the nominal money supply relative to real money demand determines the price level. He combined it with the assumption of purchasing power parity to explain (i) the international distribution of world money under metallic standards and fixed exchange rates, and (ii) exchange rate determination under floating rates and inconvertible paper currencies. He paired it with the idea of money wage and/or interest rate stickiness in ...
Working Paper
Heterogeneity and aggregation in the labor market : implications for aggregate preference shifts
The cyclical behavior of hours of work, wages, and consumption does not conform with the prediction of the representative agent with standard preferences. The residual in the intra-temporal first-order condition for commodity consumption and leisure is often viewed as a failure of labor-market clearing. We show that a simple heterogeneous agent economy with incomplete markets and indivisible labor generates an aggregation error that looks much like the preference residual in aggregate data. Our results caution against viewing the preference residual as a failure of labor-market clearing or a ...
Working Paper
Labor supply shifts and economic fluctuations
We propose a new VAR identification scheme that distinguishes shifts of and movements along the labor demand schedule to identify labor-supply shocks. According to our VAR analysis of post-war U.S. data, labor-supply shifts account for about 30 percent of the variation in hours and about 15 percent of the output fluctuations at business cycle frequencies. To assess the role of labor-supply shifts in a more structural framework, estimates from a dynamic general equilibrium model with stochastic variation in home production technology are compared to those from the VAR.
Working Paper
Labor-Market Wedge under Engel Curve Utility: Cyclical Substitution between Necessities and Luxuries
In booms, households substitute luxuries for necessities, e.g., food away from home for food at home. Ignoring this cyclical pattern of composition changes in the consumption basket makes the labor-market wedge -- a measure of inefficiency that reflects the gap between the marginal rate of substitution and the real wage -- appear to be more volatile than it actually is. Based on the household expenditure pattern across 10 consumption categories in the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we show that taking into account these composition changes can explain 6-15% of the cyclicality in the measured ...
Working Paper
On the employment effect of technology : evidence from U.S. manufacturing for 1958-1996
Recently, Gal and others have found that technological progress may be contractionary: a favorable technology shock reduces hours worked in the short run. We ask whether this observation is robust in disaggregate data. According to our VAR analysis of 458 four-digit U.S. manufacturing industries for 1958-1996, some industries do exhibit temporary reduction in hours in response to a permanent increase in TFP. However, there are far more industries in which technological progress significantly increases hours. Using micro data on average price duration, we ask whether the difference across ...