Search Results
Discussion Paper
Whither Labor Force Participation?
Halting a nearly decade-long downward trend, the U.S. labor force participation rate (LFPR) has flattened since 2016, fluctuating within a narrow range a little below 63 percent. What role has the economy played in this change and what can we expect for the future? In this post, we investigate the extent to which the recent flattening of participation can be attributed to the simultaneous robust improvement in the labor market. We also assess the future path of participation in the medium run should labor market conditions improve further.
Working Paper
Labor Market Policies During an Epidemic
We study the positive and normative implications of labor market policies that counteract the economic fallout from containment measures during an epidemic. We incorporate a standard epidemiological model into an equilibrium search model of the labor market to compare unemployment insurance (UI) expansions and payroll subsidies. In isolation, payroll subsidies that preserve match capital and enable a swift economic recovery are preferred over a cost-equivalent UI expansion. When considered jointly, however, a cost-equivalent optimal mix allocates 20 percent of the budget to payroll subsidies ...
How Should the Government Spend the Fiscal Budget during the COVID-19 Pandemic?
A mix of expanded unemployment insurance benefits and payroll subsidies to employers may be more effective in speeding up the recovery than implementing just one of those policies.
Discussion Paper
How Attached to the Labor Market Are the Long-Term Unemployed?
In this second post in our series on measuring labor market slack, we analyze the labor market outcomes of long-term unemployed workers to assess their employability and labor force attachment. If long-term unemployed workers are essentially nonparticipants, their job-finding prospects and attachment to the labor force should resemble those of nonparticipants who are not looking for a job and should differ considerably from those of short-term unemployed workers. Using data that allow us to follow workers over longer time periods, we find that differences in labor market outcomes between ...
Report
The role of start-ups in structural transformation
The U.S. economy has been going through a striking structural transformation?the secular reallocation of employment across sectors?over the past several decades. We propose a decomposition framework to assess the contributions of various margins of firm dynamics to this shift. Using firm-level data, we find that at least 50 percent of the adjustment has been taking place along the entry margin, owing to sectors receiving shares of start-up employment that differ from their overall employment shares. The rest is mostly the result of life cycle differences across sectors. Declining overall ...
Working Paper
What Do Data on Millions of U.S. Workers Reveal about Life-Cycle Earnings Risk?
We study the evolution of individual labor earnings over the life cycle using a large panel data set of earnings histories drawn from U.S. administrative records. Using fully nonparametric methods, our analysis reaches two broad conclusions. First, earnings shocks display substantial deviations from lognormality?the standard assumption in the incomplete markets literature. In particular, earnings shocks display strong negative skewness and extremely high kurtosis?as high as 30 compared with 3 for a Gaussian distribution. The high kurtosis implies that in a given year, most individuals ...
Report
Labor Market Policies during an Epidemic
We study the positive and normative implications of labor market policies that counteract the economic fallout from containment measures during an epidemic. We incorporate a standard epidemiological model into an equilibrium search model of the labor market to compare unemployment insurance (UI) expansions and payroll subsidies. In isolation, payroll subsidies that preserve match capital and enable a swift economic recovery are preferred over a cost-equivalent UI expansion. When considered jointly, however, a cost-equivalent optimal mix allocates 20 percent of the budget to payroll subsidies ...
Report
Geographical reallocation and unemployment during the Great Recession: the role of the housing bust
This paper quantitatively evaluates the hypothesis that the housing bust in 2007 decreased geographical reallocation and increased the dispersion and level of unemployment during the Great Recession. We construct an equilibrium model of multiple locations with frictional housing and labor markets. When house prices fall, the amount of home equity declines, making it harder for homeowners to afford the down payment on a new house after moving. Consequently, the decline in house prices reduces migration and causes unemployment to rise differently in different locations. The model accounts for ...
Working Paper
Labor Market Shocks and Monetary Policy
We develop a heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model featuring a frictional labor market with on-the-job search to quantitatively study the positive and normative implications of employer-to-employer (EE) transitions for macroeconomic outcomes and monetary policy. We find that EE dynamics played an important role in shaping inflation dynamics during the Great Recession and COVID-19 recoveries, with the former exhibiting subdued EE transitions and inflation despite both episodes sharing similar unemployment dynamics. Optimal monetary policy prescribes a strong positive response to EE ...
Working Paper
Labor Market Policies During an Epidemic
We study the effects and welfare implications of labor market policies that counteract the economic fall out from containment policies during an epidemic. We incorporate a standard epidemiological model into an equilibrium search model of the labor market to compare unemployment insurance (UI) expansions and payroll subsidies. In isolation, payroll subsidies that preserve match capital and enable a swift economic recovery are preferred over a cost-equivalent UI expansion. When considered jointly, however, a cost-equivalent optimal mix allocates 20 percent of the budget to payroll subsidies ...