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Working Paper
Labor-Market Wedge under Engel Curve Utility: Cyclical Substitution between Necessities and Luxuries
In booms, households substitute luxuries for necessities, e.g., food away from home for food at home. Ignoring this cyclical pattern of composition changes in the consumption basket makes the labor-market wedge -- a measure of inefficiency that reflects the gap between the marginal rate of substitution and the real wage -- appear to be more volatile than it actually is. Based on the household expenditure pattern across 10 consumption categories in the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we show that taking into account these composition changes can explain 6-15% of the cyclicality in the measured ...
Working Paper
Geopolitical Oil Price Risk and Economic Fluctuations
This paper seeks to understand the general equilibrium effects of time-varying geopolitical risk in oil markets. Answering this question requires simultaneously modeling several features including macroeconomic disasters and geopolitically driven oil production disasters, oil storage and precautionary savings, and the endogenous determination of uncertainty about output and the price of oil. We find that oil price uncertainty tends to be driven by macroeconomic uncertainty. Shifts in the probability of a geopolitically driven major oil supply disruption have meaningful effects on the price of ...