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Working Paper
The effect of health insurance on married female labor supply
We investigate the effects of employer-provided health insurance on the labor supply of married women. Because health benefits commonly are restricted to full-time workers, wives who prefer to work short hours but have no alternate source of insurance may work long hours in order to acquire coverage for their families. We use data from the April 1993 Current Population Survey Benefits Supplement, and we exploit variation in coverage under husbands' health plans to estimate the magnitude of this effect. Our reduced-form labor supply models indicate a strong negative effect of husbands' ...
Working Paper
Declining job security
Although common belief and recent evidence point to a decline in "job security," the academic literature to date has been noticeably silent regarding the behavioral underpinnings of declining job security. In this paper, I define job security in the context of implicit contracts designed to overcome incentive problems in the employment relationship. Contracts of this nature imply the possibility of inefficient separations in response to adverse shocks, and they generate predictions concerning the relationship between job security parameters-such as worker seniority, aggregate shocks, and ...
Report
Redefining the labor market. SF Fed economists Rob Valletta, Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, and Mary C. Daly share their thoughts on the U.S. labor market with fellow economist President John Williams
Changes in demographics, and in employer and worker needs, have redefined the U.S. labor market. We discuss the "new normal" in our 2015 annual report, What We've Learned?and why it matters. Observations include how the gig economy?or sharing economy?is affecting the part-time workforce. We also look at influences on labor force participation rates and clarify the math behind sluggish wage growth. A consideration for both is the retirement of higher-earning baby boomers and the increase in steady employment for lower-wage workers.
Journal Article
Higher education, wages, and polarization
The earnings gap between people with a college degree and those with no education beyond high school has been growing since the late 1970s. Since 2000, however, the gap has grown more for those who have earned a post-graduate degree as well. The divergence between workers with college degrees and those with graduate degrees may be one manifestation of rising labor market polarization, which benefits those earning the highest and the lowest wages relatively more than those in the middle of the wage distribution.
Journal Article
Long-term unemployment: what do we know?
U.S. labor market conditions have improved over the past few years. But the average duration of unemployment has remained very high, suggesting that job prospects for the long-term unemployed have stagnated. However, a closer look at the data indicates that the incidence of long-term unemployment has declined over the past few years, and that job prospects for the long-term unemployed are not as downbeat as the average duration data suggest.
Journal Article
The minimum wage
Journal Article
Recent layoffs in a fragile labor market
Rising layoff rates during the spring of 2011 highlight renewed labor market weakness. Although job cuts among state and local governments have accelerated over the past few years, most of the recent increase occurred among private-sector employers. Following modest improvement in early summer, subsequent labor market performance has been uneven, indicating that labor market conditions remain fragile.
Journal Article
Anxious workers
In recent years, the U.S. economy has expanded at a healthy pace, employment has grown substantially, and the unemployment rate has dropped to very low levels. Despite these favorable trends, some recent news stories have emphasized worker anxiety and uncertainty about their job stability and security, reinvigorating a theme that gained substantial prominence in the mid-1990s. Research economists who have investigated this topic in general have not subscribed to the view that rising worker anxiety reflects widespread, long-term changes in labor market conditions; rather, some have argued that ...
Journal Article
On the move: California employment law and high-tech development
Journal Article
East Asia's impact on Twelfth District exports