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Jel Classification:J65 

Working Paper
Earnings Business Cycles: The Covid Recession, Recovery, and Policy Response

Using a panel of tax data, we follow the earnings of individuals over business cycles. Compared to prior recessions, the Covid policy response and recovery were far more progressive. Among workers starting in the bottom quintile, median real earnings including fiscal relief increased 66 percent in 2020 and earnings increases offset relief decreases in the 2021 recovery. After the prior two recessions, this measure had decreased by 24 percent. Among those starting in the top quintile, median and average real earnings were approximately unchanged. This difference from prior recessions is ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2023-004

Journal Article
Increasing Employment by Halting Pandemic Unemployment Benefits

In mid-2021, 26 states halted participation in all or some federal emergency unemployment benefits (EUB) programs before those programs' federal funding lapsed. This article uses this asynchronous EUB cessation between early- and late-halting states to estimate the causal impact of benefit cessation on employment. We find that cessation increased employment by 29 persons for every 100 (pre-halt) EUB recipients. Expressed as a number of jobs, if all states had halted EUB in June, September employment would have been 3.4 million persons higher relative to a no-halt counterfactual. Late-halting ...
Review , Volume 104 , Issue 3 , Pages 166-177

Working Paper
Consumer Bankruptcy and Unemployment Insurance

We quantitatively evaluate the effects of UI on bankruptcy in an equilibrium model of labor market search and defaultable debt. First, we ask whether a standard unsecured credit model extended with labor market search and matching frictions can account for the negative correlation between UI caps and bankruptcy rates observed in the data. The model can account for this fact only if estimated with the employment rate among bankruptcy filers as a target. Not matching this employment rate underestimates the consumption smoothing benefits of UI cap increases, as the model assigns too much ...
Working Papers , Paper 24-09

Working Paper
A Quantitative Theory of Time-Consistent Unemployment Insurance

During recessions, the U.S. government substantially increases the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits through multiple extensions. This paper seeks to understand the incentives driving these increases. Because of the trade-off between insurance and job search incentives, the classic time-inconsistency problem arises. During recessions, the U.S. government substantially increases the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits through multiple extensions. This paper seeks to understand the incentives driving these extensions. Because of the trade-off between insurance and ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2016-11

Journal Article
Student Loans Under the Risk of Youth Unemployment

While most college graduates eventually find jobs that match their qualifications, the possibility of long spells of unemployment and/or underemployment?combined with ensuing difficulties in repaying student loans?may limit and even dissuade productive investments in human capital. The author explores the optimal design of student loans when young college graduates can be unemployed and reaches three main conclusions. First, the optimal student loan program must incorporate an unemployment compensation mechanism as a key element, even if unemployment probabilities are endogenous and subject ...
Review , Volume 98 , Issue 2 , Pages 129-158

Working Paper
Disincentive Effects of Unemployment Insurance Benefits

Unemployment insurance (UI) acts both as a disincentive for labor supply and as a demand stimulus which may explain why empirical studies often find limited effects of UI on employment. This paper provides independent estimates of the disincentive effects arising from the largest expansion of UI in U.S. history, the pandemic unemployment benefits. Using high-frequency data on small restaurants and retailers from Homebase, we control for local demand effects by comparing neighboring businesses that largely share the positive impact of UI stimulus. We find that employment in low-wage businesses ...
Working Paper , Paper 23-11

Working Paper
The Jobs Effect of Ending Pandemic Unemployment Benefits: A State-Level Analysis

This paper uses the asynchronous cessation of emergency unemployment benefits (EUB) in 2021 to investigate the jobs impact of ending unemployment benefits. While some states stopped providing EUB in September, others stopped as early as June. Using the cessation month as an instrument, we estimate the effect on employment of reducing unemployment rolls. In the second month following a state’s program termination, for every 100 person reduction in beneficiaries, state employment causally increased by about 27 persons. The effect is statistically different from zero and robust to a wide array ...
Working Papers , Paper 2022-010

Report
Macroeconomics and Household Heterogeneity

The goal of this chapter is to study how, and by how much, household income, wealth, and preference heterogeneity amplify and propagate a macroeconomic shock. We focus on the U.S. Great Recession of 2007-2009 and proceed in two steps. First, using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we document the patterns of household income, consumption and wealth inequality before and during the Great Recession. We then investigate how households in different segments of the wealth distribution were affected by income declines, and how they changed their expenditures differentially during the ...
Staff Report , Paper 529

Working Paper
The Implications of Labor Market Heterogeneity on Unemployment Insurance Design

We digitize state-level and time-varying unemployment insurance (UI) laws on initial eligibility, payment amount, and payment duration and combine them with microdata on labor market outcomes to estimate UI eligibility, take-up, and replacement rates at the individual level. We document how levels of income and wealth affect unemployment risk, eligibility,take-up, and replacement rates both upon job loss and over the course of unemployment spells. We evaluate whether these empirical findings are important for shaping UI policy design using a general equilibrium incomplete markets model ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-026

Working Paper
The Heterogeneous Impacts of Job Displacement: Evidence from Canadian Job Separation Records

When estimating earnings losses upon job separations, existing strategies focus on separations in mass layoffs to distinguish involuntary separations from voluntary separations. We revisit the measurement of the sources and consequences of involuntary separations using Canadian job separation records. We refine existing strategies and find that only a quarter of mass-layoff separations are indeed layoffs. We provide guidance on how to effectively filter out spurious separations when using databases with sparse information on separations. Isolating involuntary mass-layoff separations with our ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-022

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