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Working Paper
Magazine prices revisited
This paper examines price adjustment behavior in the magazine industry. In a frequently cited study, Cecchetti (1986) constructs a reduced-form (S,s) model for firms. Cecchetti assumes that a firm's pricing rules are fixed for non-overlapping three-year intervals and estimates the model using a conditional logit specification from Chamberlain (1980). The estimates are inconsistent, however, due to the state-dependent specification of the model. I illustrate the econometric problems in Cecchetti's results through a Monte Carlo exercise and then suggest a method for producing consistent ...
Journal Article
Has the U.S. economy become less interest rate sensitive?
Jonathan L. Willis and Guangye Cao investigate shifts in the economy?s sensitivity to interest rates by examining how total employment responds to changes in monetary policy.
Journal Article
Stuck in Part-Time Employment
Although the share of workers employed part time for economic reasons has declined, it is unlikely to return to its pre-recession level in the near future.
Journal Article
Has the U.S. economy become less interest rate sensitive?
Jonathan Willis and Guangye Cao investigate shifts in the economy?s sensitivity to interest rates by examining how total employment responds to changes in monetary policy.
Journal Article
What impact will E-commerce have on the U.S. economy?
In recent years, e-commerce has emerged as the fastest growing sector of the U.S. marketplace. Despite the contraction in the high-tech industry during the recent recession, firms have continued to enter and expand their presence in e-commerce, and consumers have increased the number of purchases made online. E-commerce currently represents a very small share of overall commerce, but it is expected to continue to expand rapidly in coming years. As e-commerce grows, so will its impact on the overall economy. ; The primary route by which e-commerce will affect the economy at large is through ...
Working Paper
The economics of labor adjustment : mind the gap
We study inferences about the dynamics of labor adjustment obtained by the "gap methodology" of Caballero and Engel [1993] and Caballero, Engel and Haltiwanger [1997]. In that approach, the policy function for employment growth is assumed to depend on an unobservable gap between the target and current levels of employment. Using time series observations, these studies reject the partial adjustment model and find that aggregate employment dynamics depend on the cross-sectional distribution of employment gaps. Thus, nonlinear adjustment at the plant level appears to have aggregate ...
Working Paper
Targeting inflation in the 1990s: recent challenges
This paper provides an evaluation of the effectiveness of inflation targeting in four industrial countries --New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Sweden --focussing on the recent period of economic recovery. Evidence drawn from fmancial market data suggests that credibility of their inflation targeting regimes on balance has deteriorated during the past year and a half, as reflected mainly in sizeable increases in medium-and long-term interest rates. Even after accounting for spillovers from increases in real rates globally (which appear to have been important) and cyclical effects, ...
Working Paper
The economics of labor adjustment : mind the gap
We study the inferences about labor adjustment costs obtained by the "gap methodology" of Caballero and Engel [1993] and Caballero, Engel and Haltiwanger [1997]. In that approach, the policy function of a manufacturing plant is assumed to depend on the gap between a target and the current level of employment. Using time series observations, these studies reject the quadratic cost of adjustment model and find that aggregate employment dynamics depend on the cross sectional distribution of employment gaps. We argue that these conclusions may not be justified. Instead these findings may ...
Working Paper
Hours and employment implications of search frictions: matching aggregate and establishment-level observations
This paper studies worker and job flows at the establishment and aggregate levels. The paper is built around a set of facts concerning the variability of unemployment and vacancies in the aggregate, the distribution of net employment growth and the comovement of hours and employment growth at the establishment level. A search model with frictions in hiring and firing is used as a framework to understand these observations. Notable features of this search model include non-convex costs of posting vacancies, establishment level profitability shocks and a contracting framework that determines ...
Working Paper
Mind the (approximation) gap: a robustness analysis
This note continues the discussion of the results reported by Ricardo Caballero and Eduardo Engel (1993), hereafter CE, and Ricardo Caballero, Eduardo Engel, and John Haltiwanger (1997), hereafter CEH, by responding to the results reported in Christian Bayer (2008). Russell Cooper and Jonathan Willis (2004), hereafter CW, find that the aggregate nonlinearities reported in CE and CEH may be the consequence of mismeasurement of the employment gap rather than nonlinearities in plant-level adjustment. Bayer reassesses this finding in the context of the CE model in the case where static employment ...