Search Results
Working Paper
Space and time in macroeconomic panel data: young workers and state-level unemployment revisited
A provocative paper by Shimer (2001) finds that state-level youth shares and unemployment rates are negatively correlated, in contrast to conventional assumptions about demographic effects on labor markets. This paper updates Shimer's regressions and shows that this surprising correlation essentially disappears when the end of the sample period is extended from 1996 to 2005. This shift does not occur because of a change in the underlying economy during the past decade. Rather, the presence of a cross-sectional (that is, spatial) correlation in the state-level data sharply reduces the ...
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 ...
Speech
The Great Recession
Presented on September 10, 2010 at Bentley University to the Financial Planning Association of Massachusetts.
Report
Subprime outcomes: turmoil in the mortgage market
Until 2007, few Americans had probably heard the word ?subprime? - including many homeowners who would come to learn that their own mortgage was a subprime mortgage. Today, subprime mortgages are much discussed because they lie at the center of the turmoil that roiled credit markets in 2007 and 2008.
Working Paper
Mortgage-default research and the recent foreclosure crisis
This paper reviews recent research on mortgage default, focusing on the relationship of this research to the recent foreclosure crisis. Research on defaults was advanced both theoretically and empirically by the time the crisis began, but economists have moved the frontier further by improving data sources, building dynamic optimizing models of default, and explicitly addressing reverse causality between rising foreclosures and falling house prices. Mortgage defaults were also a key component of early research that pointed to subprime and other privately securitized mortgages as fundamental ...
Discussion Paper
Economic policy and prospects in Iraq
This paper describes the Coalition Provisional Authority?s attempts to stabilize and reform Iraq?s economy along market lines. It argues that while security concerns remain serious, Iraq?s economy has not been crippled by violence. However, sustained economic growth will depend on whether Iraq?s future leaders pursue the pro-market approaches the Coalition has advocated. If the Iraqi economy is to reach its potential, it will need to go even farther than the Coalition did, implementing reforms the Coalition did not pursue because of security concerns.
Conference Paper
Labor supply in the new century
To explore the labor-supply trends that will affect economic policymaking in the twenty-first century, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston chose "Labor Supply in the New Century? as the theme for its 52nd Annual Economic Conference held in June 2007. The conference?s six papers and its keynote address by Eugene Steuerle provide a broad overview of the quantity and quality implications of labor-supply trends.
Report
Measuring the US Employment Situation Using Online Panels: The Yale Labor Survey
This report presents the results of a rapid, low-cost survey that collects labor market data for individuals in the United States. The Yale Labor Survey (YLS) used an online panel from YouGov to replicate statistics from the Current Population Survey (CPS), the government’s source of household labor market statistics. The YLS’s advantages include its timeliness, low cost, and ability to develop new questions quickly to study labor market patterns during the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Although YLS estimates of unemployment and participation rates mirrored the broad trends in CPS ...
Discussion Paper
Reducing foreclosures
This paper takes a skeptical look at a leading argument about what is causing the foreclosure crisis and what should be done to stop it. We use an economic model to focus on two key decisions: the borrower?s choice to default on the mortgage and the lender?s choice on whether to renegotiate or ?modify? the loan. The theoretical model and econometric analysis illustrate that ?unaffordable? loans, defined as those with high mortgage payments relative to income at origination, are unlikely to be the main reason that borrowers decide to default. Rather, the typical problem appears to be a ...
Working Paper
Labor market polarization over the business cycle
One of the most important long-run trends in the U.S. labor market is polarization, defined as the relative growth of employment in high-skill jobs (such as management and technical positions) and low-skill jobs (such as food-service and janitorial work) amid the concurrent decline in middle-skill jobs (such as clerical, construction, manufacturing, and retail occupations). Middle-skill job losses typically result from outsourcing labor to lower-wage countries or from substituting automated technologies for routine tasks. Economists are now beginning to study how long-run polarization might ...