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Journal Article
Assessing the Health of the Labor Market: The Unemployment Rate vs. Other Indicators
A question often on people?s minds is whether the unemployment rate is capturing all the relevant information on the health of the labor market these days. Are any of the other standard indicators any better? What do indexes that measure labor market conditions tell us?
Journal Article
A Regional Look at U.S. International Trade
Economic activity at the state level varies greatly across U.S. regions, with different states specializing in the production of particular goods and services. This heterogeneity in activity informs the geographic distribution of U.S. imports and exports. Using U.S. Census Bureau foreign trade statistics, the authors examine the distribution of U.S. international trade at the state level, controlling for commodities and major trading partners. They find that trade activity varies greatly from state to state and identify two factors affecting this pattern?proximity to a trading partner and ...
Working Paper
News, sovereign debt maturity, and default risk
Leading into a debt crisis, interest rate spreads on sovereign debt rise before the economy experiences a decline in productivity, suggesting that news about future economic developments may play an important role in these episodes. In a VAR estimation, a news shock has a larger contemporaneous impact on sovereign credit spreads than a comparable shock to labor productivity. A quantitative model of news and sovereign debt default with endogenous maturity choice generates impulse responses and a variance decomposition similar to the empirical VAR estimates. The dynamics of the economy after a ...
Journal Article
The Case of the Reappearing Phillips Curve: A Discussion of Recent Findings
The Phillips curve seems to have flattened over time. In this article, we use a simple New Keynesian model to analyze potential pitfalls in the estimation of the slope of the structural Phillips curve.
Journal Article
Fiscal Federalism and Optimal Income Taxes
This paper studies how local policies?specifically, taxes on income with redistributive goals?affect the migration decisions of individuals and, in turn, how these migration decisions affect local and economy-wide tax and redistribution policies. The author develops a model of optimal taxation for a federal system of governments in the tradition of Mirrlees (1971), where taxes can be fully nonlinear but informational asymmetries prevent the equalization of well being across workers due to informational rents. This article extends the large literature on federalism and tax competition by ...
Working Paper
News, sovereign debt maturity, and default risk
Leading into a debt crisis, interest rate spreads on sovereign debt rise before the economy experiences a decline in productivity, suggesting that news about future economic developments may play an important role in these episodes. In a VAR estimation, a news shock has a larger contemporaneous impact on sovereign credit spreads than a comparable shock to labor productivity. A quantitative model of news and sovereign debt default with endogenous maturity choice generates impulse responses and a variance decomposition similar to the empirical VAR estimates. The dynamics of the economy after a ...
Working Paper
Policy Interventions in Sovereign Debt Restructurings
The wave of sovereign defaults in the early 1980s and the string of debt crises in the decades that followed have fostered proposals involving policy interventions in sovereign debt restructurings. A key question about these proposals that has proved hard to handle is how they in influence the behavior of creditors and debtors. We address such challenge by incorporating these policy proposals into a quantitative model in the tradition of Eaton and Gersovitz (1981) that includes renegotiation in sovereign debt restructurings. Critically, the model also endogenizes the choice of debt maturity, ...
Journal Article
District Overview: As in the Nation, New Jobs in the District Are Concentrated in Low-Paying Industries
The Eighth District added about 150,000 jobs from 2010 to 2013, almost 75 percent of them in low-paying industries. Such jobs are growing at a faster rate than those in high-paying industries, the opposite of what is happening on the national level.
Retirements Surge for Older Workers during COVID-19
Though retirement decisions vary by different age groups, the COVID-19 pandemic increased retirement rates for those age 66 and older.