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Working Paper
Vintage capital as an origin of inequalities
Working Paper
The effects of technical change on labor market inequalities
In this chapter we inspect economic mechanisms through which technological progress shapes the degree of inequality among workers in the labor market. A key focus is on the rise of U.S. wage inequality over the past 30 years. However, we also pay attention to how Europe did not experience changes in wage inequality but instead saw a sharp increase in unemployment and an increased labor share of income, variables that remained stable in the U.S. We hypothesize that these changes in labor market inequalities can be accounted for by the wave of capital-embodied technological change, which we ...
Working Paper
Frictional wage dispersion in search models: a quantitative assessment
Standard search and matching models of equilibrium unemployment, once properly calibrated, can generate only a small amount of frictional wage dispersion, i.e., wage differentials among ex-ante similar workers induced purely by search frictions. We derive this result for a specific measure of wage dispersion|the ratio between the average wage and the lowest (reservation) wage paid. We show that in a large class of search and matching models this statistic (the mean-min ratio") can be obtained in closed form as a function of observable variables (i.e., interest rate, value of leisure, and ...
Report
Capital-skill complementarity and inequality: a macroeconomic analysis
The notion of skilled-biased technological change is often held responsible for the recent behavior of the U.S. skill premium, or the ratio between the wages of skilled and unskilled labor. This paper develops a framework for understanding this notion in terms of observable variables and uses the framework to evaluate the fraction of the skill premium's variation that is caused by changes in observables. A version of the neoclassical growth model is used in which the key feature of aggregate technology is capital-skill complementarity: the elasticity of substitution is higher between capital ...
Journal Article
News shocks and business cycles
This article considers the question, raised by Beaudry and Portier in their recent articles, of whether "news shocks" can lead to expansions and contractions that look like business cycle movements. News shocks are to be thought of solely as affecting expectations (regarding future events) and thus do not influence current resource restrictions at all. So the question is, for example, whether news about lower future productivity could lead our key aggregate variables?consumption, investment, and employment?to co-move down now. Beaudry and Portier make the point that standard neoclassical ...
Working Paper
The political economy of labor subsidies
We explore a political economy model of labor subsidies, extending Meltzer and Richard's median voter model to a dynamic setting. We explore only one source of heterogeneity: initial wealth. As a consequence, given an operative wealth effect, poorer agents work harder, and if the agent with median wealth is poorer than average, a politico-economic equilibrium will feature a subsidy to labor. The dynamic model does not have capital, but it has perfect markets for borrowing and lending. Because tax rates influence interest rates, another channel for redistribution appears, since a decrease in ...
Working Paper
Asset Trading and Valuation with Uncertain Exposure
This paper considers an asset market where investors have private information not only about asset payoffs, but also about their own exposure to an aggregate risk factor. In equilibrium, rational investors disagree about asset payoffs: Those with higher exposure to the risk factor are (endogenously) more optimistic about claims on the risk factor. Thus, information asymmetry limits risk sharing and trading volumes. Moreover, uncertainty about exposure amplifies the effect of aggregate exposure on asset prices, and can thereby help explain the excess volatility of prices and the predictability ...
Working Paper
The replacement problem in frictional economies : a near equivalence result
We examine how technological change affects wage inequality and unemployment in a calibrated model of matching frictions in the labor market. We distinguish between two polar cases studied in the literature: a "creative destruction" economy where new machines enter chiefly through new matches and an "upgrading" economy where machines in existing matches are replaced by new machines. Our main results are: (i) these two economies produce very similar quantitative outcomes, and (ii) the total amount of wage inequality generated by frictions is very small. We explain these findings in light ...
Discussion Paper
Macroeconomic implications of investment-specific technological change
A quantitative investigation of investment-specific technological change for the U.S. postwar period is undertaken, analyzing both long-term growth and business cycles within the same framework. The premise is that the introduction of new, more efficient capital goods is an important source of productivity change, and an attempt is made to disentangle its effects from the more traditional Hicks-neutral form of technological progress. The balanced growth path for the model is characterized and calibrated to U.S. National Income and Product Account data. The long- and short-run U.S. data are ...
Working Paper
Technology-policy interaction in frictional labor markets
Does capital-embodied technological change play an important role in shaping labor market outcomes? To address this question, we develop a model with vintage capital and search-matching frictions where irreversible investment in new vintages of capital creates heterogeneity in productivity among firms, matched as well as vacant. We demonstrate that capital-embodied technological change reduces labor demand and raises equilibrium unemployment and unemployment durations. In addition, the presence of labor market regulation?we analyze unemployment benefits, payroll and income taxes, and firing ...