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Report
Who Collaborates with the Soviets? Financial Distress and Technology Transfer During the Great Depression
We provide evidence that financial distress induces firms to sell their technology to foreign competitors. To do so, we construct a novel, spatial panel dataset by individually researching and locating U.S. firms who signed Technology Transfer Agreements (TTAs) with the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s in various U.S. counties. By relating the number of TTAs signed in each county to the number of bank failures, we establish a significant, positive relationship between financial distress and the number of firms signing TTAs with the Soviet Union. Our findings suggest that banking panics ...
Report
The Countercyclical Benefits of Regulatory Costs
Legal academics, journalists, and senior executive branch officials alike have assumed that the cost of imposing new regulatory requirements is higher in severe recessions that drive the central bank’s policy rate to zero than in other times. This is not correct; the aggregate output costs of regulatory requirements decrease, not increase, in such recessions. This article is the first to analyze how this effect arises, drawing on both conventional macroeconomic models and empirical findings from the econometrics literature. Scholars and policymakers have likely missed the countercyclical ...
Working Paper
Discretion Rather than Rules: Equilibrium Uniqueness and Forward Guidance with Inconsistent Optimal Plans
New Keynesian economies with active interest rate rules gain equilibrium determinacy from the central bank?s incredible off-equilibrium-path promises (Cochrane, 2011). We suppose instead that the central bank sets interest rate paths and occasionally has the discretion to change them. Private agents taking future central bank actions and their own best responses to them as given reduces the scope for self-fulfilling prophecies. With empirically-reasonable frequencies of central-bank reoptimization, the monetary-policy game has a unique Markov-perfect equilibrium wherein forward guidance ...
Working Paper
Open Mouth Operations
We examine the standard New Keynesian economy?s Ramsey problem written in terms of instrument settings instead of allocations. Its standard formulation makes two instruments available: the path of current and future interest rates, and an ?open mouth operation? which selects one of the many equilibria consistent with the chosen interest rates. Removing the open mouth operation by imposing a finite commitment horizon yields pathological policy advice that relies on the model's forward guidance puzzle.
Discussion Paper
A New Indicator of Labor Market Tightness for Predicting Wage Inflation
A key question in economic policy is how labor market tightness affects wage inflation and ultimately prices. In this post, we highlight the importance of two measures of tightness in determining wage growth: the quits rate, and vacancies per searcher (V/S)—where searchers include both employed and non-employed job seekers. Amongst a broad set of indicators, we find that these two measures are independently the most strongly correlated with wage inflation. We construct a new index, called the Heise-Pearce-Weber (HPW) Tightness Index, which is a composite of quits and vacancies per searcher, ...
Report
Congestion in Onboarding Workers and Sticky R&D
R&D investment spending exhibits a delayed and hump-shaped response to shocks. We show in a simple partial equilibrium model that rapidly adjusting R&D investment is costly if the probability of converting new hires into productive R&D workers (“onboarding”) is decreasing in the number of new hires (“congestion”). Congestion thus causes R&D-producing firms to slowly hire new workers in response to good shocks and hoard workers in response to bad shocks, providing a microfoundation for convex adjustment costs in R&D investment. Using novel, high-frequency productivity data on ...
Report
Wage Growth and Labor Market Tightness
Good measures of labor market tightness are essential to predict wage inflation and to calibrate monetary policy. This paper highlights the importance of two measures of labor market tightness in determining wage growth: the quits rate, and vacancies per effective searcher (V/ES)—where searchers include both employed and non-employed job seekers. Amongst a broad set of indicators of labor market tightness, we find that these two measures are independently the most strongly correlated with wage inflation and also predict wage growth well in out-of-sample forecasting exercises. Conversely, ...
Discussion Paper
Do Unexpected Inflationary Shocks Raise Workers’ Wages?
The past year’s steady decline in nominal wage growth now appears in danger of stalling. Given ongoing uncertainty in Ukraine and the Middle East, this seems an opportune moment to revisit the conventional wisdom about the relationship between inflation and wages: if an unexpected increase in energy costs drives up the cost of living, will workers demand higher wages, reversing the recent moderation in wage growth? In new work with Justin Bloesch and Seung Joo Lee examining those concerns, our analysis shows that the pass-through of such inflationary shocks to wages is weak.
Report
Do Cost-of-Living Shocks Pass Through to Wages?
We develop a novel, tractable New Keynesian model where firms post wages and workers search on the job, motivated by microeconomic evidence on wage setting. Because firms set wages to avoid costly turnover, the rate that workers quit their jobs features prominently in the model’s wage Phillips curve, matching U.S. empirical evidence. We then examine the response of wages to cost-of-living shocks, i.e., shocks that raise the price of household’s consumption goods but do not affect the marginal product of labor. Such shocks pass through to wages only to the extent that higher cost of living ...