Search Results
Briefing
The Impact of Higher Temperatures on Economic Growth
What happens to the economy when it gets hot outside? Despite long-standing assumptions that economic damage from rising global temperatures would be limited to the agricultural sector or developing economies, this Economic Brief presents evidence that higher summer temperatures hurt a variety of business sectors in the United States
Working Paper
Minimum wages and firm employment: evidence from China
This paper studies how minimum wage policies affect firm employment in China using a unique county level minimum wage data set matched to disaggregated firm survey data. We investigate both the effect of imposing a minimum wage, and the effect of the policies that tightened enforcement in 2004. We find that the average effect of minimum wage changes is modest and positive, and that there is a detectable effect after enforcement reform. Firms have heterogeneous responses to minimum wage changes which can be accounted for by differences in their wage levels and profit margins: firms with high ...
Report
Gender differences in the labor market effects of the dollar
Although the dollar has been shown to influence the expected wages of workers, the analysis to date has focused on the male workforce. We show that exchange rate fluctuations also have important implications for women's wages. The dominant wage effects for women?like those for men?arise at times of job transition. Changes in the value of the dollar can cause the wage gap between women who change jobs and women who stay on in their jobs to expand or contract sharply, with the most pronounced effects occurring among the least educated women and women in highly competitive manufacturing ...
Working Paper
High-growth firms in Georgia
This paper reports the results of a study of the characteristics and direct employment impact of high-growth firms operating in Georgia. The longitudinal data used in this study are from the National Establishment Time-Series (NETS) database. Using a standard definition of high employment growth to classify firms, we track the direct employment contribution of high-growth firms in the state from 1989 to 2009. We find that only a small fraction of firms satisfied the high-growth employment criteria in any year, but these rapidly growing firms made a disproportionately large contribution to ...
Speech
Reinventing older communities: bridging growth & opportunity
President Charles Plosser discusses emerging trends in the labor market, demographics, and educational system and discusses how understanding them can help prepare communities for growth and prosperity. He also cites how science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) jobs will drive future labor demand and productivity.
Briefing
Can Immigration Help Boost Rural Economies in the Fifth District and Beyond
We examine the role of immigration in rural areas. While immigrants tend to concentrate in urban areas, rural areas also significantly benefit from immigration. Agricultural firms, for example, need to hire many immigrants to help with harvesting crops. Past restrictions to immigration in rural areas haven't proven to be very effective in boosting native worker employment in these areas. First, firms respond to such restrictions by investing in new technologies at the expense of labor. Also, native workers seem unwilling to take many jobs in rural areas, which makes immigrants particularly ...