Search Results
Working Paper
Housing, portfolio choice, and the macroeconomy
Much of the macroeconomics literature dealing with wealth distribution has become abstracted from modeling housing explicitly. This paper investigates the properties of the wealth distribution and the portfolio composition regarding housing and equity holdings and their relationship to macroeconomic shocks. To this end, I construct a business cycle model in which agents differ in age, income, and wealth and derive utility from housing services. The model is consistent with several facts such as the life-cycle pattern of housing-to-wealth ratios, the larger degree of concentration for ...
Discussion Paper
Wage Growth over Unemployment Spells
This article looks at the wage growth associated with a spell of unemployment during the past three recessions. Our main findings are threefold. First, half of all unemployed workers experience a lower hourly wage once they regain employment. Second, after an unemployment spell, older workers and those without a college degree experience lower wage rowth. Third, workers who regain employment in a different industry than they were in previously tend to experience a substantial wage decline. The analysis suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic not only led to unprecedented job losses, but it could ...
Working Paper
Capital-skill complementarity and inequality: a sensitivity analysis
In ?Capital-Skill Complementarity and Inequality: A Macroeconomic Analysis,? Krusell et al. (2000) analyzed the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis as an explanation for the behavior of the U.S. skill premium. This paper shows that their model?s fit and the values of the estimated parameters are very sensitive to the data used: Alternative measures of the capital series predict skill premia that bear little resemblance to the data. We also include ten additional years of data to address the claim made by other authors that the evolution of the skill premium changed during the 1990s, but ...
Working Paper
Uninsurable individual risk and the cyclical behavior of unemployment and vacancies
This paper is concerned with the business cycle dynamics in search-and-matching models of the labor market when agents are ex post heterogeneous. We focus on wealth heterogeneity that comes as a result of imperfect opportunities to insure against idiosyncratic risk. We show that this heterogeneity implies wage rigidity relative to a complete insurance economy. The fraction of wealth-poor agents prevents real wages from falling too much in recessions since small decreases in income imply large losses in utility. Analogously, wages rise less in expansions compared with the standard model ...
Working Paper
Accounting for the cyclical dynamics of income shares
Over the business cycle, labor's share of output is negatively but weakly correlated with output, and it lags output by about four quarters. Profit's share is strongly procyclical. It neither leads nor lags output, and its volatility is about four times that of output. Despite the importance of understanding the dynamics of income shares for understanding aggregate technology and the degree of competition in factor markets, macroeconomics lacks models that can account for these dynamics. This paper constructs a model that can replicate those facts. We introduce costly entry of firms in a ...
Working Paper
Housing tenure and wealth distribution in life-cycle economies
Common practice in the housing and wealth distribution literature has proceeded as if the modeling of housing rental markets was unnecessary due to renters? relative low levels of wealth and the small fraction they represent in the total population. This paper shows, however, that their inclusion matters substantially when dealing with wealth concentration over the life cycle. Renters are concentrated in the poorer and younger groups. This concentration results in a pattern of housing wealth concentration over an agent?s life that is decreasing, with a slope as steep as that of nonhousing (or ...
Working Paper
Luxuries, Necessities, and the Allocation of Time
Households enjoy utility from activities that require a combination of time and goods. We classify activities into two types: luxuries and necessities. Luxuries (necessities) are activities for which time and expenditure shares rise (decline) with income. We develop and estimate a model with nonhomothetic preferences and find that time and goods are substitutable in producing activities. Activities are also substitutable among themselves. Hence, wage and price changes cause large reallocations of time and expenditures across activities. This effect is quantitatively important for welfare ...
Working Paper
Wages and unemployment across business cycles: a high-frequency investigation
This paper investigates the change in wages associated with a spell of unemployment. The novelty lies in using monthly data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to analyze the dynamics of those wage changes across different business cycles. The level of education or the sector of re-employment affects the change in wages following an unemployment spell differently across different downturns. The degree of wage rigidity varies across recessions; wage changes pre- and post-unemployment are sometimes procyclical and sometimes countercyclical. These results may be useful for ...
Working Paper
Comparative advantage and risk premia in labor markets
Using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), we document a significant and positive association between earnings risk (both permanent and transitory) and the level of earnings across 21 industries. We propose an equilibrium framework to analyze the interplay between earnings volatility and the distribution of skills across workers in determining a relationship between earnings and risk. We use the model to decompose how much of the empirical correlation represents compensation for risk and how much represents selection. The positive association between permanent risk and ...
Journal Article
Wage Growth over Unemployment Spells
This article looks at the wage growth associated with a spell of unemployment during the past three recessions. Our main findings are threefold. First, half of all unemployed workers experience a lower hourly wage once they regain employment. Second, after an unemployment spell, older workers and those without a college degree experience lower wage rowth. Third, workers who regain employment in a different industry than they were in previously tend to experience a substantial wage decline. The analysis suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic not only led to unprecedented job losses, but it could ...