Search Results
Working Paper
Age and Gender Differentials in Unemployment and Hysteresis
We use a time-varying panel unobserved components model to estimate unemployment gaps disaggregated by age and gender. Recessions before COVID affected men's labor market outcomes more than women's; however, the reverse was true for the COVID recession, with effects amplified for younger workers. The aggregate Phillips curve flattens over time and hysteresis is countercyclical for all groups. We find heterogeneity in both the Phillips curve and hysteresis coefficients, with wages responding more to workers with an outside option (high school- and retirement-age) and larger effects of ...
Could More Progressive Taxes Increase Income Inequality?
One paper posits that making taxes more progressive could boost lower-income households initially, but more money would eventually float to those with higher incomes.
Working Paper
Tax Progressivity, Economic Booms, and Trickle-Up Economics
We propose a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into orthogonal components measuring the level and progressivity of taxes. The level shock is similar to tax shocks found in the empirical literature--increasing the tax level is contractionary. On the other hand, an increase in tax progressivity is expansionary. When tax progressivity increases, the bottom of the income distribution experiences an increase in disposable income. Agents at the low end of the income distribution who have high marginal propensity to consume offset the decrease in consumption by the savers at the high ...
Working Paper
Tax Progressivity, Economic Booms, and Trickle-Up Economics
We study the macroeconomic and distributional effects of changes in income tax progressivity in the United States. We propose a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into orthogonal components measuring the level and progressivity of taxes. Estimating these components jointly with macroeconomic outcomes in a factor-augmented VAR, we find that tax level shocks are contractionary, while tax progressivity shocks are expansionary, raising output and consumption by shifting disposable income from high to low-income households. Despite being revenue neutral by construction, progressivity ...
Working Paper
Tax Progressivity, Economic Booms, and Trickle-Up Economics
We propose a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into orthogonal components measuring the level and progressivity of taxes. While our focus is on the progessivity results, we find that the level shock is similar to standard tax shocks found in the empirical literature in that a rise in the level is contractionary. We find that an increase in tax progressivity sets off an economic boom. When tax progressivity increases, those at the bottom of the income distribution experience an increase in disposable income; these consumers have a high marginal propensity to consume, and this ...
Working Paper
Nonlinearities, Smoothing and Countercyclical Monetary Policy
Empirical analysis of the Fed?s monetary policy behavior suggests that the Fed smooths interest rates? that is, the Fed moves the federal funds rate target in several small steps instead of one large step with the same magnitude. We evaluate the effect of countercyclical policy by estimating a Vector Autoregression (VAR) with regime switching. Because the size of the policy shock is important in our model, we can evaluate the effect of smoothing the interest rate on the path of macro variables. Our model also allows for variation in transition probabilities across regimes, depending on the ...
Working Paper
Measuring The Effect of Shocks on Inequality: It's All About the Data
To identify shocks in VARs using short-run sign or exclusion restrictions, the highest-frequency data possible is usually preferred. For income inequality, there is tension between high frequency and high quality. Annual datasets that survey large numbers of people provide high-quality estimates of income. Higher frequency surveys generally provide a sparser sampling of individual income. Some previous studies have used the higher frequency data, presumably to match the frequency necessary to identify the shock. Using data obtained from the higher frequency, lower respondent surveys might ...
Working Paper
Does Uncertainty Really Predict Recessions?
We evaluate the ability of economic uncertainty measures to forecast recessions in real time. We find that including uncertainty increases the predictive power of both in sample and out-of-sample forecast models relative to a baseline set of financial variables. A nonlinear maximum transformation of uncertainty, which captures whether a measure exceeds its maximum over the past year, improves forecast performance for some measures. Adding a contemporaneous indicator like GDP growth alongside uncertainty yields additional predictive gains. Lastly, ex post Bayesian model averaging outperforms ...
Journal Article
A Measure of Price Pressures
The Federal Reserve devotes significant resources to forecasting key economic variables such as real gross domestic product growth, employment, and inflation. The outlook for these variables also matters a great deal to businesses and financial market participants. The authors present a factor-augmented Bayesian vector autoregressive forecasting model that significantly outperforms both a benchmark random walk model and a pure time-series model. They then use these factors in an ordered probit model to develop the probability distribution over a 12-month horizon. One distribution assesses the ...
Working Paper
Measuring The Effect of Shocks on Inequality: It's All About the Data
To identify shocks in VARs using short-run sign or exclusion restrictions, the highest frequency data possible is usually preferred. For income inequality, there is tension between high frequency and high quality. Annual datasets that survey large numbers of people provide high-quality estimates of income. Higher frequency surveys generally provide a sparser sampling of individual income. Some previous studies have used the higher frequency data, presumably to match the frequency necessary to identify the shock. Using data obtained from the higher frequency, lower respondent surveys might ...