Search Results
Working Paper
Lessons for Forecasting Unemployment in the U.S.: Use Flow Rates, Mind the Trend
This paper evaluates the ability of autoregressive models, professional forecasters, and models that leverage unemployment flows to forecast the unemployment rate. We pay particular attention to flows-based approaches?the more reduced form approach of Barnichon and Nekarda (2012) and the more structural method in Tasci (2012)?to generalize whether data on unemployment flows is useful in forecasting the unemployment rate. We find that any approach that leverages unemployment inflow and outflow rates performs well in the near term. Over longer forecast horizons, Tasci (2012) appears to be a ...
Journal Article
Challenges with Estimating U Star in Real Time
Although the concept of the natural rate of employment, NAIRU, or ?U star? is used to measure the amount of slack in the labor market, it is an unobservable quantity that must be estimated using data currently available. This Commentary investigates the degree to which our estimates of U star at various points in the current business cycle have changed as real-time data have been revised and as more data points have accumulated. I find that the availability of additional data has contributed to a significant change in our estimates of U star at earlier points in the business cycle, a result ...
Working Paper
The Unintended Consequences of Employer Credit Check Bans on Labor and Credit Markets
Since the Great Recession, 11 states have restricted employers? access to the credit reports of job applicants. We document that county-level vacancies decline between 9.5 percent and 12.4 percent after states enact these laws. Vacancies decline significantly in affected occupations but remain constant in those that are exempt, and the decline is larger in counties with many subprime residents. Furthermore, subprime borrowers fall behind on more debt payments and reduce credit inquiries postban. The evidence suggests that, counter to their intent, employer credit check bans disrupt labor and ...
Journal Article
The State of States’ Unemployment in the Fourth District
Unemployment rates vary across individual US states at any point in time and respond to business-cycle fluctuations differently. Evaluating what constitutes a ?normal? level for the unemployment rate at the state level is not easy, but it is an important issue for policymakers. We introduce a framework that enables us to calculate the normal unemployment rate for each of the four states in the Fourth District and compare that rate to the national normal rate. We conclude that these states and the District as a whole have very little labor market slack left from the Great Recession.
Working Paper
Firms, Skills, and Wage Inequality
We present a model with search frictions and heterogeneous agents that allows us to decompose the overall increase in US wage inequality in the last 30 years into its within- and between-firm and skill components. We calibrate the model to evaluate how much of the overall rise in wage inequality and its components is explained by different channels. Output distribution per firm-skill pair more than accounts for the observed increase over this period. Parametric identification implies that the worker-specific component is responsible for 85 percent of this, compared to 15 percent that is ...
Journal Article
Are jobless recoveries the new norm?
Recent recessions have been followed by exceptionally slow recoveries in the labor market, and the current recession is shaping up to follow the same pattern. We take a close look at some labor market measures and uncover a difference between these recent recessions and those that preceded them - workers are staying unemployed longer. This difference is a clue we can use to predict how the current labor market recovery might proceed in the near future.
Working Paper
Positive and normative effects of a minimum wage
We review the positive and normative effects of a minimum wage in various versions of a search-theoretic model of the labor market.
Journal Article
PPP Loans & State-level Employment Growth
In this Economic Commentary, we focus on the first round of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans granted beginning in March 2020 until early August 2020, when turbulence in the labor market was pronounced, in order to demonstrate the PPP’s effects on local labor markets. We find that PPP loans helped mitigate the negative impact of the pandemic recession on state-level employment growth. States that received most of their funding early in the loan period had smaller employment declines than did states that received comparable funds later in the period.
Journal Article
An unstable Okun’s Law, not the best rule of thumb
Okun?s law is a statistical relationship between unemployment and GDP that is widely used as a rule of thumb for assessing the unemployment rate?why it might be at a certain level or where it might be headed, for example. Unfortunately, the Okun?s law relationship is not stable over time, which makes it potentially misleading as a rule of thumb.
Working Paper
The ins and outs of unemployment in the long run: a new estimate for the natural rate?
In this paper, we present a simple, reduced form model of comovements in real activity and unemployment flows and use it to uncover the trend changes in these flows, which determine the trend in the unemployment rate. We argue that this trend rate has several key features that are reminiscent of a ?natural rate.? We show that the natural rate, measured this way, has been relatively stable in the last decade, even after the last recession hit the U.S. economy. This relatively muted change was due to two opposing trend changes: On one hand, the trend in the job-finding rate, after being ...