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Journal Article
The Opioid Epidemic and the Labor Market
Drug overdoses now account for more deaths in the United States than traffic deaths or suicides, and most of the increase in overdose deaths since 2010 can be attributed to opioids--a class of drugs that includes both prescription pain relievers and illegal narcotics. We look at trends in drug use and overdose deaths to document how the opioid epidemic has evolved over time and to determine whether it could be large enough to impact the labor force.
Journal Article
Do Foreign-Born Workers Cause Native-Born Workers to Move or Leave the Labor Force?
This Commentary discusses how the presence of foreign-born workers in a local labor market affects the decisions of native-born workers to leave the labor force or move to another state. We analyze short panels obtained through the Current Population Survey and find that, in the short run, less-educated native-born workers react to a larger stock of foreign-born workers by either moving to a different state or dropping out of the labor force. In terms of magnitude, the effect is small but not insignificant.
Working Paper
Immigrants in the U.S. labor market
Immigrants supply skills that are in relatively short supply in the U.S. labor market and account for almost half of labor force growth since the mid-1990s. Migrant inflows have been concentrated at the low and high ends of the skill distribution. Large-scale unauthorized immigration has fueled growth of the low-skill labor force, which has had modest adverse fiscal and labor market effects on taxpayers and U.S.-born workers. High-skilled immigration has been beneficial in most every way, fueling innovation and spurring entrepreneurship in the high tech sector. Highly skilled immigrants have ...
Journal Article
Child Care, COVID-19, and our Economic Future
Child care is important for cultivating the future workforce, and it also ensures that working parents of today can participate in the economy, helping to achieve the Federal Reserve’s mandate for full employment. While child care in the U.S. is a piece of critical infrastructure, it is often invisible and undervalued. Straddling the lines between parenting, education, and small business, child care does not get the full attention and resources of any particular domain, and its contribution to the economy has been overlooked.Longstanding and widespread constraints in the child care sector ...
Journal Article
The Role of Immigration in U.S. Labor Market Tightness
Immigrants contribute a large portion of the growth in the U.S. population and labor force. However, immigration flows into the United States slowed significantly following immigration policy changes from 2017 to 2020 and the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis of state-level data shows that this migration slowdown tightened local labor markets modestly, raising the ratio of job vacancies to unemployed workers 5.5 percentage points between 2017 and 2021. More recent data show immigration has rebounded strongly, helping to close the shortfall in foreign-born labor and ease tight labor ...
Working Paper
Unemployment Paths in a Pandemic Economy
The COVID-19 pandemic has upended the U.S. economy and labor market. We assess the initial spike in unemployment due to the virus response and possible paths for the official unemployment rate through 2021. Substantial uncertainty surrounds the path for measured unemployment, depending on the path of the virus and containment measures and their impact on reported job search activity. We assess potential unemployment paths based on historical patterns of monthly flows in and out of unemployment, adjusted for unique features of the virus economy. The possible paths vary widely, but absent ...
Working Paper
Understanding the Great Recession
We argue that the vast bulk of movements in aggregate real economic activity during the Great Recession were due to financial frictions interacting with the zero lower bound. We reach this conclusion looking through the lens of a New Keynesian model in which firms face moderate degrees of price rigidities and no nominal rigidities in the wage setting process. Our model does a good job of accounting for the joint behavior of labor and goods markets, as well as inflation, during the Great Recession. According to the model the observed fall in total factor productivity and the rise in the cost ...
Journal Article
Employment Challenges for the Formerly Incarcerated
The U.S. economy is on a historic run of job creation, with 76 straight months of job growth as of June 2016. Many firms are looking for new pools of talent as traditional pools are increasingly absorbed by rising employment. Wages are beginning to rise more rapidly than they have for several years, with ADP?s Workforce Vitality Report for Q1 2016 estimating annual wage growth for full-time job holders of 4.7 percent. The strengthening labor market provides an opportunity for both employers and policymakers to reconsider the status of subgroups that face distinct barriers to the job market. ...
Journal Article
Young Workers Fuel Recovery in Jobs Requiring a High School Diploma or Less
The labor force of individuals with a high school diploma or less has surpassed pre-pandemic levels thanks to an increase in the number of young workers. However, this shift toward younger workers could affect both the current and future productive capacity of the economy. Young workers lack experience and work fewer hours, which could lead to productivity losses in the short term. More concerningly, some young people appear to be foregoing education to work, which may hurt their future labor market prospects.
Working Paper
Immigration Restrictions and the Wages of Low-Skilled Labor: Evidence from the 1920s
This paper examines how the U.S. immigration restrictions of the 1920s affected the wages of low-skilled workers using newly digitized annual wage data from 1910 to 1930. Exploiting variation across local labor markets, we find that wages for low-skilled workers rose faster in areas more affected by the restrictions. These wage effects emerged early in the 1920s and persisted throughout the decade across manufacturing, construction, and agricultural sectors. Our findings help explain previously documented internal migration patterns and demonstrate how reduced immigration affected labor ...