Search Results
Working Paper
Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects
Since 2007, the labor force participation rate has fallen from about 66 percent to about 63 percent. The sources of this decline have been widely debated among academics and policymakers, with some arguing that the participation rate is depressed due to weak labor demand while others argue that the decline was inevitable due to structural forces such as the aging of the population. In this paper, we use a variety of approaches to assess reasons for the decline in participation. Although these approaches yield somewhat different estimates of the extent to which the recent decline in ...
Working Paper
Okun Revisited: Who Benefits Most from a Strong Economy
Previous research has shown that the labor market experiences of less advantaged groups are more cyclically sensitive than the labor market experiences of more advantaged groups; in other words, less advantaged groups experience a high-beta version of the aggregate fluctuations in the labor market. For example, when the unemployment rate of whites increases by 1 percentage point, the unemployment rates of African Americans and Hispanics rise by well more than 1 percentage point, on average. This behavior is observed across other labor-market indicators, and is roughly reversed when the ...
Journal Article
Economic implications of changing population trends
Working Paper
Minimum wage effects on employment and school enrollment: reply to Evans and Turner
In earlier work, we presented results suggesting that minimum wage increases have important consequences for both the employment opportunities of youths and their decision to enroll in school. In this paper, we show that the recent claim made by William Evans and Mark Turner that our results are sensitive to changes in the definition of the enrollment rate is based upon an analysis that uses a mismeasured minimum wage index. When the data are constructed properly, our original conclusions are not affected by changes in the enrollment definition.
Conference Paper
Regional house price dispersion and interregional migration
Working Paper
The causes and consequences of economic restructuring: evidence from the early 21st century
A number of industries underwent large and permanent reductions in employment growth at the beginning of this decade, a process we label as restructuring. We describe how restructuring occurred and what its consequences were for the economy. In particular, we find that restructuring stemmed largely from relative demand shocks (though technology shocks were important in some industries) and that elevated levels of permanent job destruction and permanent layoffs were distinguishing features of industries subject to restructuring. In addition, most workers displaced in restructuring industries ...