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Working Paper
The Decline of the U.S. Labor Share
Over the past quarter century, labor?s share of income in the United States has trended downwards, reaching its lowest level in the postwar period after the Great Recession. Detailed examination of the magnitude, determinants and implications of this decline delivers five conclusions. First, around one third of the decline in the published labor share is an artifact of a progressive understatement of the labor income of the self-employed underlying the headline measure. Second, movements in labor?s share are not a feature solely of recent U.S. history: The relative stability of the aggregate ...
Journal Article
The wage growth gap for recent college grads
Median starting wages of recent college graduates have not kept pace with median earnings for all workers over the past six years. This type of gap in wage growth also appeared after the 2001 recession and closed only late in the subsequent labor market recovery. However the wage gap in the current recovery is substantially larger and has lasted longer than in the past. The larger gap represents slow growth in starting salaries for graduates, rather than a shift in types of jobs, and reflects continued weakness in the demand for labor overall.
Working Paper
Using Brexit to Identify the Nature of Price Rigidities
Using price quote data that underpin the official U.K. consumer price index (CPI), we analyze the effects of the unexpected passing of the Brexit referendum to the dynamics of price adjustments. The sizable depreciation of the British pound that immediately followed Brexit works as a quasi-experiment, enabling us to study the transmission of a large common marginal cost shock to inflation as well as the distribution of prices within granular product categories. A large portion of the inflationary effect is attributable to the size of price adjustments, implying that a time-dependent ...
Working Paper
The labor market in the Great Recession
This paper documents the adjustment of the labor market during the recession, and places it in the broader context of previous postwar downturns. What emerges is a picture of labor market dynamics with three key recurring themes: 1. From the perspective of a wide range of labor market outcomes, the 2007 recession represents the deepest downturn in the labor market in the postwar era. 2. Until recently, the nature of labor market adjustment in the current recession has displayed a notable resemblance to that observed in past severe downturns. 3. During the latter half of 2009, however, the ...
Journal Article
The Divergent Signals about Labor Market Slack
A broad dashboard of indicators is sending mixed signals about the state of the labor market. Some indicators have deviated widely from their normal historical relationships since the onset of COVID-19. Because of the uneven economic impact of the pandemic, the labor force participation rate, payroll employment, and the share of job losers among the unemployed have provided more reliable signals about overall conditions than other components of the dashboard. They suggest that labor slack is higher than implied by the current headline unemployment rate.
Journal Article
Taking the pulse of the tech sector: a coincident index of high-tech activity
A new index of the U.S. high-tech sector, drawing upon a range of technology-specific data, has the potential to offer a more timely assessment of economic activity than has been possible to date. The index suggests that while the tech sector has rebounded from its poor performance in the 2000-01 "tech bust," it has not resumed its rapid expansion of the late 1990s.
Journal Article
Social security and the consumer price index for the elderly
Some argue that social security benefits should be adjusted using a price index that reflects the spending habits of the elderly rather than those of workers. This study suggests that if such an index were adopted today, over the next forty years benefit levels would increase and the social security trust fund could become insolvent up to five years sooner than projected.
Journal Article
Do alternative measures of GDP affect its interpretation?
Gross domestic product's high correlation with unemployment and inflation makes it a key measure of the U.S. economy. Yet the somewhat arbitrary nature of the GDP construction process complicates interpretation and measurement of the indicator. A study of an alternative measure of GDP designed to address the published series' limitations finds that the adjusted measure differs in its representation of the long-term trend--but not the short-term fluctuations--of GDP. The published series' relevance as an indicator is therefore robust to some of the arbitrariness of its construction.
Working Paper
Technology diffusion and postwar growth
In the aftermath of WorldWar II, the world's economies exhibited very different rates of economic recovery. We provide evidence that those countries that caught up the most with the U.S. in the postwar period are those that also saw an acceleration in the speed of adoption of new technologies. This acceleration is correlated with the incidence of U.S. economic aid and technical assistance in the same period. We interpret this as supportive of the interpretation that technology transfers from the U.S. to Western European countries and Japan were an important factor in driving growth in these ...
Journal Article
The unemployment gender gap during the 2007 recession
Women fared decidedly better than men during the most recent recession. By August 2009, the unemployment rate for men had hit 11.0 percent, while that for women held at 8.3 percent. This 2.7 percentage point unemployment gender gap--the largest in the postwar era--appears to reflect two factors: first, men were much more heavily represented in the industries that suffered the most during the downturn. Second, there was a much sharper increase in the percentage of men who--prompted, perhaps, by a decline in household liquidity--rejoined the labor force but failed to find a job.