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Working Paper
Characterizations in a random record model with a non-identically distributed initial record
We consider a sequence of random length M of independent absolutely continuous observations Xi, 1 = i = M, where M is geometric, X1 has cdf G, and Xi, i = 2, have cdf F. Let N be the number of upper records and Rn, n = 1, be the nth record value. We show that N is free of F if and only if G(x) = G0(F (x)) for some cdf G0 and that if E (|X2|) is finite so is E |Rn|) for n = 2 whenever N = n or N = n. We prove that the distribution of N along with appropriately chosen subsequences of E(Rn) characterize F and G, and along with subsequences of E Rn - Rn-1) characterize F and G up to a common ...
Working Paper
Moving to a job: The role of home equity, debt, and access to credit
Using credit report data from two of the three major credit bureaus in the United States, we infer with high certainty whether households move to other labor markets defined by metropolitan areas. We estimate how moving patterns relate to labor market conditions, personal credit, and homeownership using panel regressions with fixed effects which control for all constant individual-specific traits. We interpret the patterns through simulations of a dynamic model of consumption, housing, and location choice. We find that homeowners with negative home equity move more than other homeowners, in ...
Working Paper
Earnings mobility and instability, 1969-1995
We study earnings mobility and instability using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our main contribution is to update mobility and instability calculations to include data from the 1990s, although we also provide a number of tests of robustness across mobility and instability indicators and sample definition. All in all, we find few trends in earnings instability since the 1970s, particularly among younger workers. However, we find no evidence that instability continued to increase throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. With regard to mobility, we find greater upward mobility ...
Working Paper
Identification of search models with initial condition problems
This paper extends previous work on the identification of search models in which observed worker productivity is imperfectly observed. In particular, it establishes that these models remain identified even when employment histories are left-censored (i.e. we do not get to follow workers from their initial job out of unemployment), as well as when workers set different reservation wages from one another. We further show that allowing for heterogeneity in reservation can affect the empirical estimates we obtain, specifically estimates of the rate at which workers receive job offers.
Journal Article
New data on worker flows during business cycles
The most obvious economic cost of recessions is that workers become involuntarily unemployed. During the average business cycle contraction, total employment declines by about 1.5 percent, the unemployment rate rises by 2.7 percentage points, and it takes almost two years before employment recovers its pre-recession level. Both fiscal policy and monetary policy are concerned with these business cycle deviations of employment from its "full-employment" or "equilibrium" level. The aggregate statistics on employment and unemployment mask economically important information about the composition ...
Newsletter
Explaining the recent decline in the unemployment rate
The unemployment rate fell by nearly 1 percentage point between November 2010 and March 2011. Was this drop due to unemployed workers exhausting their unemployment insurance (UI) benefits and choosing to stop looking for work or due to more positive labor market developments, such as fewer workers losing their jobs or more workers finding new jobs?
Working Paper
Macroeconomic effects of employment reallocation
Major shifts in employment between industries and between firms within industries usually accompany recessions. Although this observation suggests that exogenous changes in the optimal allocation of labor are an important source of aggregate employment fluctuations, the macroeconomic significance of such shocks has remained unknown. This paper empirically assesses the role of reallocation shocks for cyclical employment fluctuations, and investigates the relationship between inter- and intrasectoral employment flows. In an analysis of total employment and the share employed in manufacturing, ...
Working Paper
The role of the housing market in the migration response to employment shocks
The United States is known for the ability of its residents to move to where the jobs are, and this has helped the nation maintain its position as the world?s top economy. Households? decisions to move depend not only on job prospects but also on the relative cost of housing. I investigate how the housing market affects the flow of workers across cities. This occurs through at least two channels: the relative mobility of homeowners versus renters, and the relative cost of housing across markets. I use homeownership rates to measure the former, and use an index that measures house prices ...
Working Paper
Spatial Wage Gaps in Frictional Labor Markets
We develop a job ladder model with labor reallocation across firms and regions, and estimate it on matched employer-employee data to study the large and persistent real wage gap between East and West Germany. We find that the wage gap is mostly due to firms paying higher wages per efficiency unit in West Germany and quantify a rich set of frictions preventing worker reallocation across space and across firms. We find that three spatial barriers impede East Germans’ ability to migrate West: migration costs, a preference to live in the East, and fewer job opportunities received from the West. ...
Working Paper
Understanding the Long-Run Decline in Interstate Migration: Online Appendix
This appendix contains eight sections. Section 1 gives technical details of how we calculate standard errors in the CPS data. Section 2 discusses changes in the ACS procedures before 2005. Section 3 examines demographic and economic patterns in migration over the past two decades, in more detail than in the main paper. Section 4 examines the cross-sectional variance of location-occupation interactions in earnings when we define locations by MSAs instead of states. Section 5 describes alternative methods to estimate the variance of location-occupation interactions in income. Section 6 measures ...