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Journal Article
Always look for the disclaimer
Journal Article
After rocky 2008, U.S. consumers seek stable ground in 2009
An economy besieged on a number of fronts in 2008 staggers into 2009 with rising unemployment, falling house prices, and strained financial markets. A recessionary environment poses formidable challenges for U.S. consumers in the coming year.
Unpaid Absence from Work Because of COVID-19
As has been widely reported, the March employment report shed light on the early impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the U.S. labor market. One telling number is the official unemployment rate, which tallies the share of the labor force made up of people out of work (but who are looking for a job) plus those who have been laid off and expect to be recalled. The official unemployment rate increased from 3.5 percent in February to 4.4 percent in March. My own preferred measure is the share of the working-age population who are unemployed, working part-time because of economic conditions, or ...
Working Paper
Earnings on the information technology roller coaster: insight from matched employer-employee data
This paper uses matched employer-employee data for the state of Georgia to examine workers? earnings experience through the information technology (IT) sector?s employment boom of the mid-1990s and its bust in the early 2000s. The results show that even after controlling for individual characteristics before the sector?s boom, transitioning out of the IT sector to a non-IT industry generally resulted in a large wage penalty. However, IT service workers who transitioned to a non-IT industry still fared better than those who took a non-IT employment path. For IT manufacturing workers, there is ...
Journal Article
Putting U.S. manufacturing in perspective
Journal Article
Using federal funds futures rates to predict Federal Reserve actions
The federal funds futures rate naturally embodies the market's expectation of the average behavior of the federal funds rate. But, as John C. Robertson and Daniel L. Thornton explain, analysts cannot attempt to identify Fed policy from the behavior of the federal funds futures rate without making somewhat arbitrary additional assumptions. The authors investigate the predictive accuracy of a rule based on the federal funds futures rate from October 1988 through August 1997 using an assumption that is sufficient for partially identifying when the market is expecting a Fed action but not for ...
Conference Paper
Resolving the liquidity effect.
Journal Article
Living in an 800 MHz economy
Journal Article
A look ahead: housing, energy squeezed in '08
If economic growth slows in the United States in 2008, it will primarily be because of factors already present: a slumping housing market, high energy costs, and turbulence in worldwide financial markets.