Search Results
Why Human Capital Matters Why Human Capital Matters
An economist at the St. Louis Fed discusses the growing importance of human capital in determining a nation’s income.
Newsletter
AI and the Future of Work: Opportunity or Threat?
This article describes how AI works and how it could impact industries, create new opportunities, and transform job tasks across skill levels.
Journal Article
Why Are Some Places So Much More Unequal Than Others?
This study examines the magnitude and sources of regional wage inequality in the United States. The authors find that, as in the nation as a whole, wage inequality has increased in nearly every metropolitan area since the early 1980s, though there is significant variation among places in both the degree of wage inequality and the pace at which it has risen. The most unequal places tend to be large urban areas that have benefited from strong demand for skill and agglomeration economies, with these factors leading to particularly rapid wage growth for high-skilled workers. The least unequal ...
Working Paper
Complex-Task Biased Technological Change and the Labor Market
In this paper we study the relationship between task complexity and the occupational wage- and employment structure. Complex tasks are defined as those requiring higher-order skills, such as the ability to abstract, solve problems, make decisions, or communicate effectively. We measure the task complexity of an occupation by performing Principal Component Analysis on a broad set of occupational descriptors in the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) data.We establish four main empirical facts for the U.S. over the 1980-2005 time period that are robust to the inclusion of a detailed set of ...
Discussion Paper
Restructuring the Eligibility Policies of the Child Care and Development Fund to Address Benefit Cliffs and Affordability: Florida as a Case Study
This paper explores how the current eligibility policies of the federal Child Care and Development Fund (CCDF) create benefits cliffs that act as barriers to economic self-sufficiency. By examining Florida data and policies, the authors demonstrate how the program’s existing co-payment schedule affects the same hypothetical family living in two contrasting Florida counties: one with state median living costs and one with high living costs. The authors find that the CCDF income eligibility exit threshold is too low, particularly in high-cost counties. That occurs because the exit threshold ...
Working Paper
The Postpandemic U.S. Immigration Surge: New Facts and Inflationary Implications
The U.S. experienced an extraordinary postpandemic surge in unauthorized immigration. This paper combines administrative data on border encounters and immigration court records with household survey data to document two new facts about these immigrants: They tend to be hand-to-mouth consumers and low-skilled workers that complement the existing workforce. We build these features into a model with capital, household heterogeneity and population growth to study the inflationary effects of this episode. Contrary to the popular view, we find little effect on inflation, as the increase in supply ...
Working Paper
Dynamic Labor Reallocation with Heterogeneous Skills and Uninsured Idiosyncratic Risk
Occupational specificity of human capital motivates an important role of occupationalreallocation for the economy’s response to shocks and for the dynamics of inequality.We introduce occupational mobility, through a random choice model with dynamicvalue function optimization, into a multi-sector/multi-occupation Bewley (1980)-Aiyagari (1994) model with heterogeneous income risk, liquid and illiquid assets, priceadjustment costs, and in which households differ by their occupation-specific skills.Labor income is a combination of endogenous occupational wages and idiosyncraticshock. ...
Discussion Paper
Benefits Cliffs and the Financial Incentives for Career Advancement: A Case Study of the Health Care Services Career Pathway
Benefits cliffs, which occur when earnings gains are offset by the loss of public benefits, have long been recognized to create financial disincentives for low-income individuals to earn more income. In this paper, the authors develop a new methodology to study benefits cliffs in the context of career advancement. The authors illustrate the change in net financial resources for an individual pursuing the health care services career pathway from certified nursing assistant (CNA) to licensed practical nurse (LPN) to registered nurse (RN). Accounting for increases in taxes and the loss of public ...
Working Paper
The Nature of Technological Change 1960-2016
We present a unified technological explanation of both the movement of workers across jobs using different skills and the changes in skill use within jobs. An envelope-theorem approach allows us to estimate relative skill-productivity growth from worker mobility using OLS while making minimal assumptions on each occupation's production function. Using six decades of data, we conclude that routine-cognitive- and finger-dexterity-skill productivity grew rapidly and abstract- and social-skill productivity grew slowly - a form of "skill bias." These effects, along with our estimated relationships ...
Speech
What kind of jobs have been created during the recovery?
Remarks at the Regional Economic Press Briefing, New York City.