Search Results
Working Paper
Opioids and the Labor Market
This paper studies the relationship between local opioid prescription rates and labor market outcomes. We improve the joint measurement of labor market outcomes and prescription rates in the rural areas where nearly 30 percent of the US population lives. We find that increasing the local prescription rate by 10 percent decreases the prime-age employment rate by 0.50 percentage points for men and 0.17 percentage points for women. This effect is larger for white men with less than a BA (0.70 percentage points) and largest for minority men with less than a BA (1.01 percentage points). Geography ...
Journal Article
Measuring total employment: are a few million workers important?
How can we measure total employment in the economy? The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides two different-and sometimes contradictory-measures of this key indicator. During the 1990s, the gap between the two measures has widened to more than five million workers. This Economic Commentary examines the current discrepancy between the two measures of employment and explores its significance in interpreting our economy's health.
Journal Article
The effect of falling home prices on small business borrowing
Small businesses continue to report problems in obtaining the financing they need. Because small business owners may rely heavily on the value of their homes to finance their businesses (through mortgages or home equity lines), the fall in housing prices might be one of the causes of their difficulty. We analyze information from a variety of sources and find that homes do constitute an important source of capital for small business owners and that the impact of the recent decline in housing prices is significant enough to be a real constraint on small business finances.
Journal Article
What’s Gone Wrong (and Right) in the Industrial Heartland?
The historically Midwestern manufacturing region, sometimes referred to as the ?Rust Belt,? faced another challenging period after 2000 when manufacturing employment declined by 1.2 million jobs. This Commentary investigates the relative economic performance of this region versus other US metropolitan areas during and following these job losses. The analysis shows that while unemployment rates have recovered in the metro areas of the industrial heartland, other economic indicators lag behind the manufacturing-intensive metro areas outside of the region.
Working Paper
Macro- and microeconomic consequences of wage rigidity
An exploration of the micro- and macroeconomic theories, implications, and evidence of wage rigidity from the perspective of human resource managers and economic researchers, showing that human resource policies can subtly alter the rigidity of wages.
Working Paper
How wages change: micro evidence from the International Wage Flexibility Project
How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals? earnings in 31 different data sets from sixteen countries, from which we obtain a total of 360 wage change distributions. We find a remarkable amount of variation in wage changes across workers. Wage changes have a notably non-normal distribution; they are tightly clustered around the median and also have many extreme values. Furthermore, nearly all countries show ...
Report
The effects of inflation on wage adjustments in firm-level data: grease or sand?
This paper studies the effects of inflation on wage changes made by firms in a unique thirty-seven-year panel of occupations and employers drawn from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Community Salary Survey (CSS). Our analysis first identifies two relative prices embedded in wage changes and, second, draws inferences about the costs and benefits of inflation from the adjustments in these relative prices. Typically, firms manage employer-wide wage adjustments (controlling for occupational wage changes) separately from their interoccupational wage changes (controlling for employer wage ...
Journal Article
Regional wage convergence and divergence: adjusting wages for cost-of- living differences
An examination of the divergence of U.S. regional fortunes in the early 1980s, showing that once regional prices are factored in, relative wage rates continue to converge across regions. The trend in regional wage variation is also shown to be attributable to declining differences in labor market valuations of worker attributes, rather than to shifts in the regional composition of the workforce.
Working Paper
The effects of minimum wages on the distribution of family incomes: a nonparametric analysis
The primary goal of a national minimum wage floor is to raise the incomes of poor families with members in the work force. We present evidence on the effects of minimum wages on family incomes from March CPS surveys. Using non-parametric estimates of the distributions of family income relative to needs in states and years with and without minimum wage increases, we examine the effects of minimum wages on this distribution, and on the distribution of the changes in income that families experience. Although minimum wages do increase the incomes of some poor families, the evidence indicates that ...
Working Paper
The effects of inflation on wage adjustments in firm-level data: grease or sand?
An analysis of whether inflation facilitates adjustments to shocks or distorts relative prices, examining the wage-setting process across a panel of occupations and employers and finding that the costs of inflation may rise more rapidly than its benefits beyond quite modest rates of increase in the price level.