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Journal Article
District Overview: As in the Nation, New Jobs in the District Are Concentrated in Low-Paying Industries
The Eighth District added about 150,000 jobs from 2010 to 2013, almost 75 percent of them in low-paying industries. Such jobs are growing at a faster rate than those in high-paying industries, the opposite of what is happening on the national level.
Working Paper
Heterogeneous Agents Dynamic Spatial General Equilibrium
I develop a dynamic model of migration and labor market choice with incomplete markets and uninsurable income risk to quantify the effects of international trade on workers’ employment reallocation, earnings, and wealth. Macroeconomic conditions in different labor markets and idiosyncratic shocks shape agents’ labor market choices, consumption, earnings, and asset accumulation over time. Despite the rich heterogeneity, the model is highly tractable as the optimal consumption, labor supply, capital accumulation, and migration and reallocation decisions of individual workers across ...
Journal Article
Bank Lending During Recessions
Tightening of lending standards can account for part of the negative loan growth during the 2007-09 recession.
Reading the Labor Market in Real Time
A coincident index developed by one of our economists can help gauge the pace of the recovery and obtain real-time information on the state of the labor market.
Working Paper
Improving Sovereign Debt Restructurings
The wave of sovereign defaults in the early 1980s and the string of debt crises in subsequent decades have fostered proposals involving policy interventions in sovereign debt restructurings, and the recent global pandemic crisis has further reignited this discussion. A key question about these policy proposals for debt restructurings that has proved hard to handle is how they influence the behavior of creditors and debtors. We address this challenge by evaluating policy proposals in a quantitative sovereign default model that incorporates two essential features: maturity choice and debt ...
Working Paper
Improving Sovereign Debt Restructurings
The wave of sovereign defaults in the early 1980s and the string of debt crises in subsequent decades have fostered proposals involving policy interventions in sovereign debt restructurings. The global financial crisis and the recent global pandemic have further reignited this discussion among academics and policymakers. A key question about these policy proposals for debt restructurings that has proved hard to handle is how they influence the behavior of creditors and debtors. We address this challenge by evaluating policy proposals in a quantitative sovereign default model that ...
Working Paper
The geography of wealth: shocks, mobility, and precautionary savings
The spatial distribution of wealth in the United States is very heterogeneous, with important differences within and across US states. We study the distribution of wealth in a country and how it is shaped by the characteristics earnings across regions, and by the frictions individuals face to move and reallocate across space. For this, we develop a tractable model of consumption, savings, and location choice with many regions, incomplete markets, and heterogeneous agents facing persistent and transitory income shocks. Our analysis focuses on the role of income shocks, precautionary savings, ...
Working Paper
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
International trade has increased at a rapid pace in the last decades, altering production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. The estimated effects of trade on employment and welfare critically depend on data about workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. I show that the estimated employment and welfare effects of international trade, and the estimated structural parameters of standard models are biased when the analysis uses data subject to misclassification errors. I develop an econometric framework to estimate misclassification ...
Working Paper
News, sovereign debt maturity, and default risk
Leading into a debt crisis, interest rate spreads on sovereign debt rise before the economy experiences a decline in productivity, suggesting that news about future economic developments may play an important role in these episodes. In a VAR estimation, a news shock has a larger contemporaneous impact on sovereign credit spreads than a comparable shock to labor productivity. A quantitative model of news and sovereign debt default with endogenous maturity choice generates impulse responses and a variance decomposition similar to the empirical VAR estimates. The dynamics of the economy after a ...
Journal Article
Which Jobs Have Been Hit Hardest by COVID-19?
Between mid-March and the end of April, U.S. unemployment rolls rose quickly to 33 million, while the unemployment rate jumped to almost 15%.