Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 34.
(refine search)
Working Paper
The Impact of the Age Distribution on Unemployment: Evidence from US States
Economists have studied the potential effects of shifts in the age distribution on the unemployment rate for more than 50 years. Most of this analysis uses a “shift-share” method, which assumes that the demographic structure has no indirect effects on age-specific unemployment rates. This paper uses state-level data to revisit the influence of the age distribution on unemployment in the United States. We examine demographic effects across the entire age distribution rather than just the youth share of the population—the focus of most previous work—and extend the date range of analysis ...
Working Paper
Job-to-Job Flows and the Consequences of Job Separations
A substantial empirical literature documents large and persistent average earnings losses following job displacement. Our paper extends the literature on displaced workers by providing a comprehensive picture of earnings and employment outcomes for all workers who separate. We show that for workers not recalled to their previous employer, earnings losses follow separations in general, as opposed to displacements in particular. The key predictor of earnings losses is not displacement but the length of the nonemployment spell following job separation. Moreover, displaced workers are no more ...
Working Paper
Why Do Earnings Fall with Job Displacement?
The earnings of workers are reduced for many years after being displaced from their jobs, and those workers and their families face increased risk of other problems as well. The ills suffered by displaced workers motivated several recent expansions of government programs, including the unemployment insurance system, and have spurred calls for wage insurance that would provide longerrun earnings replacement. However, while the magnitude of the losses is relatively clear, the theory of why displacement matters is scattered and somewhat undeveloped. Much of the policy discussion appears to ...
Working Paper
Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity in the United States during and after the Great Recession
Rigidity in wages has long been thought to impede the functioning of labor markets. In this paper, we investigate the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in US labor markets using job-level data from a nationally representative establishment-based compensation survey collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We use several distinct methods to test for downward nominal wage rigidity and to assess whether such rigidity is less or more severe in the presence of negative economic shocks than in more normal economic times. We find a significant amount of downward nominal wage rigidity in ...
Working Paper
Job-to-job flows and the consequences of job separations
This paper extends the literature on the earnings losses of displaced workers to provide a more comprehensive picture of the earnings and employment outcomes for workers who separate. First, we compare workers who separate from distressed employers (presumably displaced workers) and those who separate from stable or growing employers. Second, we distinguish between workers who do and do not experience a spell of joblessness. Third, we examine the full distribution of earnings outcomes from separations - not the impact on only the average worker. We find that earnings outcomes depend much less ...
Working Paper
Excess Persistence in Employment of Disadvantaged Workers
We examine persistence in employment-to-population ratios in excess of that implied by persistence in aggregate labor market conditions, among less-educated individuals using state-level data for the United States. Dynamic panel regressions and local projections indicate a moderate degree of excess persistence, which dissipates within three years. We find no significant asymmetry between the excess persistence of high vs. low employment rates. The cumulative effect of excess persistence in the business cycle surrounding the 2001 recession was mildly positive, while the effect in the cycle ...
Working Paper
Has compensation become more flexible?
In recent years, numerous observers have argued that global competition, increased reliance on contingent workers, and the breakdown of implicit contracts have made compensation practices in the United States more flexible; in particular, employers have become more concerned with how an employee's pay compares to that in other firms and less concerned with considerations of equity or relative pay within the firm. This paper uses establishment-level data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employment Cost Index program to examine this claim by asking whether the variances of compensation ...
Working Paper
Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects
Since 2007, the labor force participation rate has fallen from about 66 percent to about 63 percent. The sources of this decline have been widely debated among academics and policymakers, with some arguing that the participation rate is depressed due to weak labor demand while others argue that the decline was inevitable due to structural forces such as the aging of the population. In this paper, we use a variety of approaches to assess reasons for the decline in participation. Although these approaches yield somewhat different estimates of the extent to which the recent decline in ...
Working Paper
The importance of employer-to-employer flows in the U.S. labor market
In order to measure the flexibility of the labor market, evaluate the job-worker matching process, and model business-cycle dynamics, economists have studied the flows of workers across the labor market states of employment, unemployment, and not in the labor force. One important flow that has been poorly measured is the movement of workers from one employer to another without any significant intervening period of nonemployment. This paper exploits the "dependent interviewing" techniques used in the Current Population Survey since 1994 to estimate such flows. We find that they are large, ...
Working Paper
Investment and union certification
A growing body of work--both theoretical and empirical--has emphasized that unionization may be better understood as a tax on capital rather than a tax on labor. Under this "new" view, unionization unambiguously lowers investment. Using data on union certification elections, we estimate the impact of unionization on firms' investment behavior. Employing both a standard q-model and an "investment surprises" technique, we find that union certification significantly reduces investment. We find that a winning certification election has, on average, about the same effect on investment as would ...