Search Results

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT
JEL Classification:J62 

Journal Article
High and Volatile Inflation Begets a More Volatile Business Cycle

Following five years of inflation above the Federal Reserve's 2 percent target, a pressing question for policymakers is: what are the macroeconomic consequences of inflation remaining persistently elevated? Drawing on historical lessons from the 1970s and a new theoretical framework, this paper shows that elevated and persistent inflation makes the economy more vulnerable to costpush shocks. When inflation is already high, a cost-push shock generates larger and more persistent inflation and a deeper output contraction than it would in an environment of low and stable inflation. The ...
Policy Hub , Volume 2026 , Issue 5 , Pages 10

Discussion Paper
Benefits Cliffs as a Barrier to Career Advancement for Low-Income Adults: Insights from Employment Services Providers

How do employment service providers explain benefits cliffs to clients who want to advance in their careers? To answer this question, the authors conducted three focus groups with a range of employment service providers. Focus group participants report that counselors and clients struggle to manage benefits loss because of a lack of clarity on program rules and difficulty finding appropriate jobs that pay enough to outweigh the loss of benefits. When advising clients about career advancement, counselors use a range of intake processes to determine clients’ immediate needs and assess their ...
FRB Atlanta Community and Economic Development Discussion Paper , Paper 2020-2

Discussion Paper
Benefits Cliffs as a Barrier to Career Advancement for Low-Income Adults: Insights from Employment Services Providers

How do employment service providers explain benefits cliffs to clients who want to advance in their careers? To answer this question, the authors conducted three focus groups with a range of employment service providers. Focus group participants report that counselors and clients struggle to manage benefits loss because of a lack of clarity on program rules and difficulty finding appropriate jobs that pay enough to outweigh the loss of benefits. When advising clients about career advancement, counselors use a range of intake processes to determine clients’ immediate needs and assess their ...
FRB Atlanta Community and Economic Development Discussion Paper , Paper 2020-02

Working Paper
Economic Diversity and the Resilience of Cities

We show how local worker flow adjustment margins yield a theory-consistent sufficient statistic approximating the welfare effects of local shocks. Furthermore, we isolate a city's insurance value as this approximation's second-order term. Leveraging rich labor flows data across occupations, industries, and cities in France, we estimate spatial and nonspatial flows responses to local labor demand shocks. Less economically diverse French cities experience deeper contractions in gross outflows following negative shocks. In contrast, more economic concentration begets a modestly larger increase ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2025-2

Working Paper
The Effect of Unemployment Insurance Eligibility in Equilibrium

In the United States, workers whose past earnings were below a threshold are generally ineligible for unemployment insurance (UI), creating a discontinuous jump in the value of being unemployed. Using a regression discontinuity design with administrative panel data, we estimate a sizable local effect from UI eligibility on earnings in the next employer, around 10 percent per quarter. This evidence, however, understates UI’s causal effect because of endogenous non-compliance. It also does not distinguish between underlying reasons for higher re-employment earnings, a higher share of ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2025-6

Working Paper
The Evolution of U.S. Educational Mobility over the 20th Century and the Role of Public Education

We construct two new large-scale datasets to measure relative and upward educational mobility by sex, race, class, and childhood county of residence for cohorts born in 1910–1919 and 1982–1997. We show that both relative and upward educational mobility rose over the 20th century, with historically disadvantaged groups experiencing the largest gains. We also document substantial geographic convergence over the 20th century: both within and across regions, where children live matters much less for their educational mobility today than it did at midcentury. Using a state-border design, we ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2026-1

Working Paper
The Anatomy of Polarization: Evidence from Worker Flows

Using longitudinal French administrative data (1984–2021), we document that employment polarization after 1994 reflects major changes in labor-market entry rather than mass occupational downgrading or displacement of incumbents. Flows from routine to abstract occupations remain substantial throughout the period, and a large fraction of these upgrades is due to noncollege workers. The decisive shift that generates polarization occurs at the entry margin: the net flow from nonemployment into routine occupations reverses around 1994, while the net flow from nonemployment into manual work ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2026-7

Working Paper
COVID-19 Is a Persistent Reallocation Shock

Drawing on data from the firm-level Survey of Business Uncertainty, we present three pieces of evidence that COVID-19 is a persistent reallocation shock. First, rates of excess job and sales reallocation over 24-month periods have risen sharply since the pandemic struck, especially for sales. We compute these rates by aggregating over monthly firm-level observations that look back 12 months and ahead 12 months. Second, as of December 2020, firm-level forecasts of sales revenue growth over the next year imply a continuation of recent changes, not a reversal. Third, COVID-19 shifted relative ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2021-3

Working Paper
Family characteristics and macroeconomic factors in U. S. intragenerational family income mobility, 1978–2014

Family economic mobility has been a policy concern for decades, with interest heating up further since the 1990s. Using data that tracks individual families? incomes during overlapping 10-year periods from 1978 through 2014, this paper investigates the relationships of factors ? family characteristics and macro influences ? to intragenerational mobility and whether the importance of those factors has changed over time. Family characteristics include both levels of work behavior and family structure and within-period changes in those factors, as well as time-invariant characteristics of the ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-1

Working Paper
Labor market polarization over the business cycle

One of the most important long-run trends in the U.S. labor market is polarization, defined as the relative growth of employment in high-skill jobs (such as management and technical positions) and low-skill jobs (such as food-service and janitorial work) amid the concurrent decline in middle-skill jobs (such as clerical, construction, manufacturing, and retail occupations). Middle-skill job losses typically result from outsourcing labor to lower-wage countries or from substituting automated technologies for routine tasks. Economists are now beginning to study how long-run polarization might ...
Working Papers , Paper 14-16

FILTER BY YEAR

FILTER BY CONTENT TYPE

FILTER BY AUTHOR

Mercan, Yusuf 11 items

Birinci, Serdar 10 items

Karahan, Fatih 10 items

See, Kurt 10 items

Dvorkin, Maximiliano 7 items

Mazumder, Bhashkar 5 items

show more (127)

FILTER BY JEL CLASSIFICATION

E24 28 items

J24 23 items

J31 19 items

J64 16 items

J63 13 items

show more (84)

PREVIOUS / NEXT