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Journal Article
Assessing the Risk of Extreme Unemployment Outcomes
Although the unemployment rate is at a historically low level, many policymakers are nevertheless watching projections for the future unemployment rate closely to evaluate the risk of extreme outcomes. We assess the probabilities of extreme outcomes in the near and medium term and find that the risk of unexpectedly high unemployment three years in the future has declined from its Great Recession peak and remained low over the past three years.
Working Paper
Estimating the Intergenerational Elasticity and Rank Association in the U.S.: Overcoming the Current Limitations of Tax Data
Ideal estimates of the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) in income require a large panel of income data covering the entire working lifetimes for two generations. Previous studies have demonstrated that using short panels and covering only certain portions of the life cycle can lead to considerable bias. A recent influential study by Chetty et al. (2014) using tax data estimates the IGE in family income for the entire U.S. to be 0.344, considerably lower than most previous estimates. Despite the seeming advantages of extremely large samples of administrative tax data, I demonstrate that the ...
Discussion Paper
Consumers Increasingly Expect Additional Government Support amid COVID-19 Pandemic
The New York Fed’s Center for Microeconomic Data released results today from its April 2020 SCE Public Policy Survey, which provides information on consumers' expectations regarding future changes to a wide range of fiscal and social insurance policies and the potential impact of these changes on their households. These data have been collected every four months since October 2015 as part of our Survey of Consumer Expectations (SCE). Given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, households face significant uncertainty about their personal situations and the general economic environment when forming ...
Discussion Paper
Residential Migration, Entry, and Exit as Seen Through the Lens of Credit Bureau Data
We analyze a large, nationally representative anonymized data set of consumers with a credit report from 2002 to 2010. This is a period that encompasses a boom and bust in consumer credit. Using census data, we classify consumers into four categories of relative neighborhood income and find that, over time, the number and proportion of consumers with a credit report fell in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods and rose in higher-income neighborhoods. Population trends evident from census data explain only a portion of these changes in the location of the credit bureau population. In most ...
Working Paper
Gentrification and residential mobility in Philadelphia
Gentrification has provoked considerable debate and controversy about its effects on neighborhoods and the people residing in them. This paper draws on a unique large-scale consumer credit database to examine the mobility patterns of residents in gentrifying neighborhoods in the city of Philadelphia from 2002 to 2014. We find significant heterogeneity in the effects of gentrification across neighborhoods and subpopulations. Residents in gentrifying neighborhoods have slightly higher mobility rates than those in nongentrifying neighborhoods, but they do not have a higher risk of moving to a ...
Report
Wage Insurance for Displaced Workers
Wage insurance provides income support to displaced workers who find reemployment at a lower wage. We analyze wage insurance in the context of the U.S. Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program by merging linked employer-employee Census data to TAA petitions and leveraging a discontinuity in eligibility based on worker age. Wage insurance eligibility increases short-run employment probabilities and leads to higher long-run cumulative earnings. We find shorter non-employment durations largely drive increased long-term earnings among workers eligible for wage insurance. Our results are ...
Working Paper
Factor Specificity and Real Rigidities
We develop a multisector model in which capital and labor are free to move across firms within each sector, but cannot move across sectors. To isolate the role of sectoral specificity, we compare our model with otherwise identical multisector economies with either economy-wide factor markets (as in Chari et al. 2000) or firm-specific factor markets (as in Woodford 2005). Sectoral specificity induces within-sector strategic substitutability and across-sector strategic complementarity in price setting. Our model can produce either more or less monetary non-neutrality than those other two ...
Report
Do consumers rely more heavily on credit cards while unemployed?
Leading up to the Great Recession, households increased their credit card debt by over 16 percent ($121 billion) during the five-year period from 2004 to 2009. The unemployment rate simultaneously began to rise in 2008, increasing from 5.0 percent in January 2008 to a high of 10.0 percent in October of 2009. During the recovery, from 2009 to 2014, credit card debt fell by more than 25 percent, as the unemployment rate returned to near prerecession levels. These coincident developments have led to speculation that consumers facing unemployment or job uncertainty may have increased their ...
Report
Job Ladder, Human Capital, and the Cost of Job Loss
High-tenure workers who lose their jobs experience a large and prolonged fall in wages and earnings. To quantify the forces behind this empirical regularity, we propose a rich structural model of the labor market with heterogeneous firms, on-the-job search, and firm-specific and general human capital. By jointly matching moments of workers’ mobility and wages, the model can replicate the losses in earnings and wages observed in the data. The loss of a job with a more productive employer is the primary driver of the cumulated wage losses post-displacement (50 percent), followed by the loss ...
Working Paper
The Dual U.S. Labor Market Uncovered
Aggregate U.S. labor market dynamics are well approximated by a dual labor market supplemented with a third, predominantly, home-production segment. We uncover this structure by estimating a Hidden Markov Model, a machine-learning method. The different market segments are identified through (in-)equality constraints on labor market transition probabilities. This method yields time series of stocks and flows for the three segments for 1980-2021. Workers in the primary sector, who make up around 55 percent of the population, are almost always employed and rarely experience unemployment. The ...