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Journal Article
Your current job probably won't be your last
Journal Article
Splitsville: the economics of unilateral divorce
New studies have looked at the impact of easier divorce on everything from women working outside the home to children's education to spousal violence.
Journal Article
Social changes lead married women into labor force
The ranks of women in the workforce jumped by more than 24 percentage points between 1955 and 1999. Credit labor-saving devices at home (such as the dishwasher), the birth-control pill and the preference by some men to marry a woman who works outside the home.
Journal Article
Extra credit: the rise of short-term liabilities
Not only are more American families in debt, but the median value of the debt more than doubled between 1989 and 2004. Credit cards and payday loans are two of the favorite tools for digging the hole deeper.
Journal Article
Can a summer hike cause a surprise fall for mortgage rates?
Journal Article
The effects of recessions across demographic groups
The burdens of a recession are not spread evenly across demographic groups. As the public and media noticed, from the start of the current recession in December 2007 through June 2009 men accounted for more than three-quarters of net job losses. Other differences have garnered less attention but are just as interesting. During the same period, the employment of single people fell at more than twice the rate that it did for married people and the decline for black workers was one and a half times that for white workers. To provide a more complete understanding of the effect of recessions, this ...
Newsletter
U.S. farm subsidies
Why should the average American care about the 2008 Farm Bill and farm subsidies? Farm subsidies can affect the price of food and can influence the amount of taxes we pay. This month's Liber8 newsletter explains why farm subsidies were originally used, spotlights the debate about their continued use, and points out some changes to the 2008 Farm Bill.
Journal Article
A primer on the empirical identification of government spending shocks
The empirical literature on the effects of government spending shocks lacks unanimity about the responses of consumption and wages. Proponents of shocks identified by structural vector auto-regressions (VARs) find results consistent with New Keynesian models: consumption and wages increase. On the other hand, proponents of the narrative approach find results consistent with neoclassical models: consumption and wages decrease. This paper reviews these two identifications and confirms their differences by using standard economic series. It also uses alternative measures of government spending, ...
Journal Article
Regional aggregation in forecasting: an application to the Federal Reserve's Eighth District
Hernndez-Murillo and Owyang (2006) showed that accounting for spatial correlations in regional data can improve forecasts of national employment. This paper considers whether the predictive advantage of disaggregate models remains when forecasting subnational data. The authors conduct horse races among several forecasting models in which the objective is to forecast regional- or state-level employment. For some models, the objective is to forecast using the sum of further disaggregated employment (i.e., forecasts of metropolitan statistical area (MSA)-level data are summed to yield ...
Newsletter
Retraining displaced U.S. workers
When the current U.S. recession ends and recovery begins, many pre-recession jobs, such as some in financial services and the automobile industry, will not return. So what are the options if jobs in your chosen industry no longer exist? The September 2009 Newsletter focuses on job retraining programs and lists some areas of projected job growth for the near future.