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Journal Article
How Much Has Job Matching Efficiency Declined?
During the recession and recovery, hiring has been slower than might be expected considering the large numbers of vacant jobs and unemployed individuals. This raises some concern about structural changes in the process of matching job seekers with employers. However, the standard measures account for only the unemployed and not those who are out of the labor force. Including other non-employed groups in the measured pool of job seekers while adjusting for different job finding rates among these groups shows that the decline in matching efficiency is similar to earlier declines.
Working Paper
Dynamic Labor Reallocation with Heterogeneous Skills and Uninsured Idiosyncratic Risk
Occupational specificity of human capital motivates an important role of occupationalreallocation for the economy’s response to shocks and for the dynamics of inequality.We introduce occupational mobility, through a random choice model with dynamicvalue function optimization, into a multi-sector/multi-occupation Bewley (1980)-Aiyagari (1994) model with heterogeneous income risk, liquid and illiquid assets, priceadjustment costs, and in which households differ by their occupation-specific skills.Labor income is a combination of endogenous occupational wages and idiosyncraticshock. ...
Working Paper
Job-Finding and Job-Losing: A Comprehensive Model of Heterogeneous Individual Labor-Market Dynamics
We study the paths over time that individuals follow in the labor market, as revealed in the monthly Current Population Survey. Some people face much higher flow values from work than in a non-market activity; if they lose a job, they find another soon. Others have close to equal flow values and tend to circle through jobs, search, and non-market activities. And yet others have flow values for non-market activities that are higher than those in the market, and do not work. We develop a model that identifies and quantifies heterogeneity in dynamic individual behavior. Our model provides a ...
Briefing
Why Are Women Leaving the Labor Force?
The female labor force participation (LFP) rate has dropped steadily since 2000, especially among single women. At the same time, the percentage of single women has grown as a share of the female population, a trend that has increased the impact of the single women's LFP rate on the aggregate women's LFP rate. An analysis of data from the Current Population Survey shows that a growing percentage of single women who are not in the labor force are going to school. Meanwhile, an increasing share of married women list retirement as the reason for no longer participating in the labor force.
Journal Article
Temporary Layoffs and Unemployment in the Pandemic
Temporary layoffs accounted for essentially the entire increase in unemployment to its historically high rate in April 2020. Although the rate has come down since its peak, unemployment remains well above pre-pandemic levels. There is little evidence that temporary layoffs are becoming permanent at a higher rate than in the past. However, the continuation of the health and economic crisis poses a risk that a growing share of unemployment will consist of people in persistent categories of joblessness, thereby slowing the overall recovery.
Working Paper
Minimum Wage Increases and Vacancies
We estimate the impact of minimum-wage increases on the quantity of labor demanded as measured by firms’ vacancy postings. We use propriety, county-level vacancy data from the Conference Board’s Help Wanted Online database. Our identification relies on the disproportionate effects of minimum-wage hikes on different occupations, as the wage distribution around the binding minimum wage differs by occupation. We find that minimum-wage increases during the 2005-2018 period have led to substantial declines in vacancy postings in at-risk occupations, occupations with a larger share of ...
Journal Article
Passing Along Housing Wealth from Parents to Children
Young adults are more likely to own a home if their parents are homeowners than if their parents are renters. New research reveals how parents owning a home can lead to an increase in the persistence in homeownership across generations. Specifically, homeowner parents are often able to extract the equity value from their home to help their children purchase a home. This “dynastic” home equity enables children of homeowner parents who extract equity to accumulate approximately one third more housing wealth by age 30 than children of renters.
Working Paper
Why Is Current Unemployment So Low?
Current unemployment, as of 2019Q4, is so low not because of unusually high job finding rates out of unemployment, but because of unusually low entry rates into unemployment. The unusually low entry rates, both from employment and from out of the labor force, reflect a long-run downward trend, and have lowered the unemployment rate trend over the recent decade. In fact, the difference between the current unemployment rate and unemployment rates at the two previous cyclical peaks in 2000 and 2007 is more than fully accounted for by the decline in its trend. This suggests that the current low ...
Journal Article
Labor Indicators: Some of Today's Trends Pre-Date the Great Recession
Although the unemployment rate is strong these days, other labor-related statistics are being called weak for this stage of an economic recovery. The downward trend in labor force participation, wage growth, job reallocation and other stats started a long time ago, however.
Working Paper
House Price Responses to Monetary Policy Surprises: Evidence from the U.S. Listings Data
Existing literature documents that house prices respond to monetary policy surprises with a significant delay, taking years to reach their peak response. We present new evidence of a much faster response. We exploit information contained in listings for the residential properties for sale in the United States between 2001 and 2019 from the CoreLogic Multiple Listing Service Dataset. Using high-frequency measures of monetary policy shocks, we document that a one standard-deviation contractionary monetary policy surprise lowers housing list prices by 0.2–0.3 percent within two weeks—a ...