Search Results
Conference Paper
Social Security reform: links to saving, investment and growth
Working Paper
Job creation, job destruction, and the real exchange rate
This paper contributes to an understanding of internationally generated adjustment costs by demonstrating a statistically significant and economically relevant effect of the real exchange rate on job creation and job destruction in U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 1973 to 1993. The responsiveness of these gross job flows to the real exchange rate reflects pervasive heterogeneity with respect to international conditions across firms, even within narrowly defined industries. We document this heterogeneity and show that the responsiveness of job flows to movements in the real ...
Briefing
Evidence of a credit crunch?: results from the 2010 survey of first district community banks
This policy brief summarizes the findings of the Survey of Community Banks conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston in May 2010. This survey seeks to understand how the supply of, and demand for, bank business loans changed in the period following the financial crisis. The survey design focuses on assessing how much community banks were willing and able to lend to local businesses that used to be customers of large banks but lost access to credit in the aftermath of the financial crisis. The survey responses provide some evidence that lending standards for commercial loans have ...
Discussion Paper
An economic analysis of the 2010 proposed settlement between the Department of Justice and credit card networks
In 2010, the Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a lawsuit against the credit card networks American Express, MasterCard, and Visa for alleged antitrust violations. We evaluate the extent to which the recently proposed settlement between the DOJ and Visa and MasterCard (henceforth, "Proposed Settlement") is likely to achieve its central objective: "?to allow Merchants to attempt to influence the General Purpose [Credit] Card or Form of Payment Customers select by providing choices and information in a competitive market." In word and spirit, the Proposed Settlement represents a significant ...
Conference Paper
Social Security: how social and secure should it be?
Conference Paper
Seismic shifts: the economic impact of demographic change: an overview
Most economic developments are hard to predict. Considerable uncertainty surrounds forecasts for output growth, inflation, and unemployment a year from now, for instance. But demographic developments are different in this respect. Although demographic surprises abound, the major trends build slowly, and the broad contours of medium-term outcomes become discernible well in advance.
Discussion Paper
A new approach to raising Social Security’s earliest eligibility age
While Social Security?s Normal Retirement Age (NRA) is increasing to 67, the Earliest Eligibility Age (EEA) remains at 62. Similar plans to increase the EEA raise concerns that they would create excessive hardship on workers who are worn-out or in bad health. One simple rule to increase the EEA is to tie an increase to the number of quarters of covered earnings. Such a provision would allow those with long work lives?presumably the less educated and lower paid?to quit earlier. We provide evidence that this simple rule would not satisfy the goal of preventing undue hardship on certain workers. ...
Journal Article
Role of firms in job creation and destruction in U.S. manufacturing
Research in recent years has documented extensively the fact that labor markets are characterized by large and pervasive flows of jobs among places of employment. However, virtually none of this research pertains to the role of the firm and its decisions in determining job creation and destruction. Previous research and data-gathering efforts have focused on employment at individual physical locations called establishments, or plants. This neglect leaves fundamental questions regarding the role of firms unanswered. Job reallocation occurring within firms may have very different causes and ...
Working Paper
Gross job flows and firms
This paper extends the work of Dunne, Roberts, and Samuelson [3] and Davis, Haltiwanger, and Schuh [2] on gross job flows among manufacturing plants. Gross job creation, destruction, and reallocation have been shown to be important in understanding the birth, growth, and death of plants, and the relation of plant life cycles to the business cycle. However, little is known about job flows between firms or how job flows among plants occur within firms (corporate restructuring). We use information on company organization from the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) to investigate the ...
Discussion Paper
TIPS scorecard: are TIPS accomplishing what they were supposed to accomplish?: can they be improved?
In September 1997, the U.S. Treasury developed the TIPS market in order to achieve three important policy objectives: (1) to provide consumers with a class of assets that allows for hedging against real interest rate risk, (2) to provide holders of nominal contracts a means of hedging against inflation risk, and (3) to provide everyone with a reliable indicator of the term structure of expected inflation. This paper evaluates progress toward the achievement of these objectives and analyzes prospective ways to better meet these objectives in the future, by, for example, extending the maturity ...