Search Results
Working Paper
Cities and the growth of wages among young workers: evidence from the NLSY
Human capital-based theories of cities suggest that large, economically diverse urban agglomerations increase worker productivity by increasing the rate at which individuals acquire skills. One largely unexplored implication of this theory is that workers in big cities should see faster growth in their earnings over time than comparable workers in smaller markets. This paper examines this implication using data on a sample of young male workers drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Cohort. The results suggest that earnings growth does tend to be faster in large, ...
Working Paper
The role of the housing market in the migration response to employment shocks
The United States is known for the ability of its residents to move to where the jobs are, and this has helped the nation maintain its position as the world?s top economy. Households? decisions to move depend not only on job prospects but also on the relative cost of housing. I investigate how the housing market affects the flow of workers across cities. This occurs through at least two channels: the relative mobility of homeowners versus renters, and the relative cost of housing across markets. I use homeownership rates to measure the former, and use an index that measures house prices ...
Journal Article
Pulling up stakes: Have Americans lost the urge to move?
Related links: https://www.richmondfed.org/-/media/richmondfedorg/publications/research/econ_focus/2012/q2-3/feature1_weblinks.cfm>
Journal Article
U.S. and euro-area monetary policy by regions
Even in areas that have a common currency, economic conditions can vary greatly from one region to another. So a single uniform monetary policy may not be appropriate. For example, a simple monetary policy rule at times recommends different interest rates for different regions of the United States. Among euro-area countries, such a rule typically recommends an even greater divergence in interest rates, partly due to lower labor mobility, and less use of fiscal transfers to help smooth shocks.
Journal Article
Housing busts and household mobility: an update
Interest in the relationship between household mobility and financial frictions, especially frictions associated with negative home equity, has grown following the recent boom and bust in U.S. housing markets. With prices falling 30 percent nationally, negative equity greatly expanded across many markets. More recently, the decline in mortgage rates along with various policy interventions to encourage refinancing at historically low rates suggests the need to also revisit mortgage interest rate lock-in effects, which are likely to become important once Federal Reserve interest rate policy ...
Report
A model of job and worker flows
We develop a model of gross job and worker flows and use it to study how the wages, permanent incomes, and employment status of individual workers evolve over time. Our model helps explain various features of labor markets, such as the amount of worker turnover in excess of job reallocation, the length of job tenures and unemployment duration, and the size and persistence of the changes in income that workers experience due to displacements or job-to-job transitions. We also examine the effects that labor market institutions and public policy have on the gross flows, as well as on the ...
Report
Labor market pooling and occupational agglomeration
This paper examines the micro-foundations of occupational agglomeration in U.S. metropolitan areas, with an emphasis on labor market pooling. Controlling for a wide range of occupational attributes, including proxies for the use of specialized machinery and for the importance of knowledge spillovers, we find that jobs characterized by a unique knowledge base exhibit higher levels of geographic concentration than do occupations with generic knowledge requirements. Further, by analyzing co-agglomeration patterns, we find that occupations with similar knowledge requirements tend to ...
Journal Article
Can sectoral reallocation explain the jobless recovery?
This article reconsiders the case for sectoral labor reallocation's role in the jobless recovery. The authors review and critique previous attempts to measure sectoral reallocation, with a particular emphasis on the recent contribution of Groshen and Potter (2003). Their conclusion, based on an extension of Rissman (1997), is that the need of reallocate employment across industries was lower during the most recent two recessions than in previous business cycles. Therefore, sectoral reallocation likely has not played an important role in the jobless recoveries.
Journal Article
New data on worker flows during business cycles
The most obvious economic cost of recessions is that workers become involuntarily unemployed. During the average business cycle contraction, total employment declines by about 1.5 percent, the unemployment rate rises by 2.7 percentage points, and it takes almost two years before employment recovers its pre-recession level. Both fiscal policy and monetary policy are concerned with these business cycle deviations of employment from its "full-employment" or "equilibrium" level. The aggregate statistics on employment and unemployment mask economically important information about the composition ...
Journal Article
Has structural change contributed to a jobless recovery?
The current recovery has seen steady growth in output but no corresponding rise in employment. A look at layoff trends and industry job gains and losses in 2001-03 suggests that structural change - the permanent relocation of workers from some industries to others - may help explain the stalled growth in jobs.