Search Results
Working Paper
Ten Days Late and Billions of Dollars Short: The Employment Effects of Delays in Paycheck Protection Program Financing
Delay in the provision of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans due to insufficient initial funding under the CARES Act substantially and persistently reduced employment. Delayed loans increased job losses in May and persistently reduced recalls throughout the summer. The magnitude and heterogeneity of effects suggest significant barriers to obtaining external financing, particularly among small firms. Effects are inequitably distributed: larger among the self-employed, less well paid, less well educated and--importantly for the design of future programs--in very small firms. Our estimates ...
Working Paper
The Ways the Cookie Crumbles: Education and the Margins of Cyclical Adjustment in the Labor Market
I document that less educated workers experience higher and more cyclically sensitive job separation rates. Meanwhile, workers with a bachelor's degree or more exhibit pro-cyclical wages while workers without a high school degree exhibit no statistically discernible cyclical pattern. Differences in the sensitivity are most stark when measurement of labor costs accounts for the value of the persistent effects of current macroeconomic conditions on future remitted wages. These findings suggest optimally differential implementation of self-enforcing implicit wage contracts in which educated ...
Discussion Paper
Substitutability of Monetary Policy Instruments
This note presents an approach to infer the magnitude of changes to the level of the policy target rate--a more commonly used metric of monetary policy actions--that would lead to approximately the same macroeconomic outcomes as induced through changes in the central bank's balance sheet.
Working Paper
Wage Dispersion with Heterogeneous Wage Contracts
I study a labor market in which identical workers search on- and off-the-job and heterogeneous firms employ using either posted wages or wage contracts contingent on outside options. Firm level costs for contingent contracts generate a separating equilibrium in which less productive firms post wages. The model with heterogeneous contracts can achieve wage dispersion, labor share, employment transitions, and flow value of unemployment that are simultaneously consistent with empirical observations even when most firms post wages. Using German employee-level administrative data, I estimate ...
Discussion Paper
Quantifying Bottlenecks in Manufacturing
Shortages of key components and logistics problems have constrained factory output since the start of the year. Numerous anecdotes and survey measures have highlighted the emergence of supply chain bottlenecks and other supply constraints; to complement those qualitative characterizations, this note proposes a novel methodology to quantify bottlenecks in the manufacturing sector.
Discussion Paper
Simulating the Macroeconomic Effects of Unconventional Monetary Policies
In this note, we describe a method for calculating simulation results and demonstrate the benefits of the integrated model by analyzing a policy that entails an endogenous balance sheet response.
Working Paper
What Can We Learn from Idiosyncratic Wage Changes?
I document six facts about wage changes. First, most pay revisions occur at yearly frequency, but a small proportion occur at idiosyncratic times. Second, idiosyncratic pay changes are larger and more dispersed than year-end pay changes and resemble more pay changes occurring at job-to-job transitions. Third, idiosyncratic pay changes are more common for workers with less experience and, forth, in firms higher on the job-ladder. Fifth, industries in which the incidence of idiosyncratic raises have risen have experienced greater declines in labor share. Sixth, industries in which more firms ...
Working Paper
These Caps Spilleth Over: Equilibrium Effects of Unemployment Insurance
The design of US unemployment insurance (UI) policy--which features benefits assigned as a percentage of past wages up to a cap--engenders tests for spillovers from policy variation to workers who are not directly treated. We test for and find a pattern of spillovers from state-level UI policy changes that cannot be neatly reconciled with workhorse or cutting-edge models of UI spillovers. Instead, we show that the documented pattern conforms with the predictions of a canonical model of information frictions: wage posting with random search. Taken together, our results provide novel evidence ...
Working Paper
Hysteresis via Endogenous Rigidity in Wages and Participation
We document that the past three ?jobless? recoveries also featured asymmetries in labor force participation and labor compensation, with each falling to new lows during each cycle. We model these asymmetries as resulting from a strategic complementarity in firms' wage setting and workers' job search strategies. Strategic complementarity results in a continuum of possible equilibria with higher-wage equilibria welfare dominating lower-wage equilibria. Assuming that no economic agent deviates from an existing strategy unless deviation is a unilateral best response, the model exhibits (1) ...