Search Results
Labor Force Exits and COVID-19: Who Left, and Are They Coming Back?
Millions of workers are still unemployed or have dropped out of the labor force. What is the likelihood that these people will return to work in the coming year?
Journal Article
Classifying Worker Types in the U.S. Labor Market
Why some worker types have difficulty finding stable jobs can’t easily be explained by demographic characteristics.
Working Paper
The Impact of Racial Segregation on College Attainment in Spatial Equilibrium
This paper seeks to understand the forces that maintain racial segregation and the Black-White gap in college attainment, as well as their interactions with place-based policy interventions. We incorporate race into an overlapping-generations spatial-equilibrium model with parental investment and neighborhood spillovers. Race matters due to: (i) a Black-White wage gap, (ii) amenity externalities—households care about their neighborhood’s racial composition—and (iii) additional barriers to moving for Black households. We find that these forces account for 71% of the racial segregation ...
Worker Types in the U.S. Labor Market
Grouping workers by patterns in employment history can help explain persistent joblessness and the quick recovery in productivity after a recession.
Journal Article
Pandemic Recession: L- or V-Shaped?
We develop and calibrate a search-theoretic model of the labor market in order to forecast the evolution of the aggregate US labor market during and after the coronavirus pandemic. The model is designed to capture the heterogeneity of the transitions of individual workers across states of unemployment and employment and across different employers. The model is designed also to capture the trade-offs in the choice between temporary and permanent layoffs. Under reasonable parametrizations of the model, the lockdown instituted to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus is shown to have ...
Journal Article
Understanding the Generational Gaps in Homeownership
Student loan debt may contribute to the homeownership gap among generations.
Working Paper
The Alpha Beta Gamma of the Labor Market
Using a large panel dataset of US workers, we calibrate a search-theoretic model of the labor market, where workers are heterogeneous with respect to the parameters governing their employment transitions. We first approximate heterogeneity with a discrete number of latent types, and then calibrate type-specific parameters by matching type-specific moments. Heterogeneity is well approximated by 3 types: αs, βs and γs. Workers of type α find employment quickly because they have large gains from trade, and stick to their jobs because their productivity is similar across jobs. Workers of type ...
Journal Article
Real Wage Growth at the Micro Level
This article investigates patterns in real wage growth in 2022 to determine whether wages have kept up with rising price levels and how this differs among labor market participants. Using the consumer price index for wages and imputing expenditure data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we separately measure nominal wage growth and inflation rates at the micro level. We find that there is more heterogeneity in the former, meaning that when we combine them, an individual's real wage growth is primarily driven by their nominal wage growth. In 2022, 57 percent of individuals experienced ...
Working Paper
The Alpha Beta Gamma of the Labor Market
We access a long panel dataset of US workers to document the extent to which individuals are heterogeneous with respect to their pattern of transitions across employment states. We find that heterogeneity is well approximated by three latent types: αs, βs and γs. Workers of type α leave unemployment quickly and, once they find a job, they are likely to keep it for more than 2 years. Workers of type γ find employment slowly and, once they do find a job, they are likely to leave it within 1 year. We use our empirical findings to calibrate a search-theoretic model in which workers are ...
Working Paper
Labor Force Exiters around Recessions: Who Are They?
This paper identifies workers who experience a job separation during a recession and tracks their labor force status in the following year using the Current Population Survey. Workers are classified as exiters if they leave the labor force shortly after their job loss and non-exiters if they do not. The pool of exiters is disproportionately female, less-educated, and older. During the pandemic recession, there were even more older workers in the exiters pool, although they were less likely to report being retired compared to in the Great Recession. In addition, statuses were more persistent ...