Search Results
Working Paper
Family Job Search and Wealth: The Added Worker Effect Revisited
We propose and estimate a model of family job search and wealth accumulation with data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). This dataset reveals a very asymmetric labor market for household members who share that their job finding is stimulated by their partners' job separation. We uncover a job search-theoretic basis for this added worker effect, which occurs mainly during economic downturns, but also by increased non-employment transfers. Thus, our analysis shows that the policy goal of in-creasing non-employment transfers to support a worker's job search is partially ...
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 Paper
Enhanced Unemployment Insurance Benefits in the United States during COVID-19: Equity and Efficiency
We assess the effects of the historically unprecedented expansion of U.S. unemployment insurance (UI) payments during the COVID-19 pandemic. The adverse economic impacts of the pandemic, notably the pattern of job losses and earnings reductions, were disproportionately born by lower-income individuals. Focusing on household income as a broad measure of well-being, we document that UI payments almost completely offset the increase in household income inequality that otherwise would have occurred in 2020 and 2021. We also examine the impacts of the $600 increase in weekly UI benefit payments, ...
Working Paper
Labor Market Shocks and Monetary Policy
We study the positive and normative implications for inflation of employer-to-employer (EE) worker transitions by developing a heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model featuring a frictional labor market with on-the-job search. We find that EE dynamics played an important role in shaping the differential inflation dynamics observed during the Great Recession and COVID-19 recoveries. Despite both recoveries sharing similar unemployment dynamics, the recovery from the Great Recession exhibited subdued EE transitions and inflation dynamics. In our model, the optimal monetary policy involves a ...
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 Paper
Worker and Firm Search in the Labor Market: Evidence from Classified Advertisements
We present new monthly city-level and national measures of worker and firm search from 1900 to 1938, derived from scanned images of U.S. newspapers. To our knowledge, we are the first to systematically use the “situations-wanted” advertisements placed by job seekers. We document fresh insights into early 20th-century labor market dynamics: (1) worker and firm search efforts are procyclical; (2) posting costs affectadvertising behavior and labor search intensity; (3) the Beveridge curve is stable over the last 125 years, with similar shifts following the 1918 flu and Covid-19 pandemic; and ...
Working Paper
The Implications of Labor Market Heterogeneity on Unemployment Insurance Design
We digitize state-level and time-varying unemployment insurance (UI) laws on eligibility, payment amount, and payment duration and combine them with microdata to estimate UI eligibility, take-up, and replacement rates at the individual level. We document how income and wealth levels affect unemployment risk, eligibility, take-up, and replacement rates over the course of unemployment. We evaluate whether these findings are important for shaping UI policy design using a general-equilibrium incomplete-markets model with a frictional labor market that matches our empirical findings. We show that ...
Working Paper
The Implications of Labor Market Heterogeneity on Unemployment Insurance Design
We digitize state-level, time-varying unemployment insurance (UI) laws on initial eligibility, payment amounts, and payment durations, 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 income and wealth levels 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 with a ...
Working Paper
Spousal Labor Supply Response to Job Displacement and Implications for Optimal Transfers
I document a small spousal earnings response to the job displacement of the family head. The response is even smaller in recessions, when earnings losses are larger and additional insurance is valuable. Using cross-state differences in transfer generosity, I find that generous transfers substantially crowd out the spousal earnings response. To study its policy implications, I develop an incomplete markets model with family labor supply and aggregate fluctuations, where predicted labor supply elasticities to taxes and transfers are in line with empirical estimates both in aggregate and across ...