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Working Paper
Should risky firms offer risk-free DB pensions?
We develop a simple model of pension financing to study the effects of pension risk on shareholder value. In the model, firms minimize costs, total compensation must clear the labor market, and a government pension insurer guarantees a portion of promised benefits. We find that in the absence of mispriced pension insurance, the optimal pension strategy under most specifications is to immunize all sources of market risk. Mispriced pension insurance, however, gives firms the incentive to introduce risk into their pension promises, offering an explanation for some of the observed prevalence of ...
Working Paper
Why do firms offer risky defined benefit pension plans?
Even risky pension sponsors could offer essentially riskless pension promises by contributing a sufficient level of resources to their pension trust funds and by investing those resources in fixed-income securities designed to deliver their payoffs just as pension obligations are coming due. However, almost no firm has chosen to fund its plan in this manner. We study the optimal funding choice for plan sponsors by developing a simple model of pension financing in which the total compensation offered to workers must clear the labor market. We find that if workers understand the implications of ...
Working Paper
A quantitative exploration of the opportunistic approach to disinflation
A number of observers have advocated recently that the Federal Reserve take an ``opportunistic'' approach to the conduct of monetary policy. A hallmark of this approach is that the central bank focuses on fighting inflation when inflation is high, but focuses on stabilizing output when inflation is low. The implied policy rule is nonlinear. This paper compares the behavior of inflation and output under opportunistic and conventional linear policies. Using stochastic simulations of a small-scale rational expectations model, we study the cost and time required to achieve a given disinflation, ...
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 ...
Working Paper
The Unequal Distribution of Economic Education : A Report on the Race, Ethnicity, and Gender of Economics Majors at US Colleges and Universities
The distribution of economic education among US college graduates is quite unequal: female and underrepresented minority undergraduates, collectively, major in economics at 0.36 the rate that white, non-Hispanic male students do. This paper makes a four-part contribution to address this imbalance. First and foremost, we provide detailed comparative data at the institution level to provoke and inform the attention of economists and senior administrators at colleges and universities, among others. Second, we establish a definition of full inclusion in economic education on college and ...
Working Paper
The opportunistic approach to disinflation
This paper explores the theoretical foundations of a new approach to monetary policy. Proponents of this approach hold that when inflation is moderate but still above the long-run objective, the Fed should not take deliberate anti-inflation action, but rather should wait for external circumstances-such as favorable supply shocks and unforeseen recessions-to deliver the desired reduction in inflation. While waiting for such circumstances to arise, the Fed should aggressively resist incipient increases in inflation. This strategy has come to be known as "the opportunistic approach to ...