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Working Paper
Fast Locations and Slowing Labor Mobility
Declining internal migration in the United States is driven by increasing home attach-ment in locations with initially high rates of population turnover. These ?fast? locations were the population growth destinations of the 20th century, where home attachments were low, but have increased as regional population growth has converged. Using a novel measure of attachment, this paper estimates a structural model of migration that distinguishes moving frictions from home utility. Simulations quantify candidate explanations of the decline. Rising home attachment accounts for most of the decline not ...
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 ...
Journal Article
The foreign-born population in upstate New York
An analysis of upstate New York's foreign-born residents suggests that they contribute to the region's human capital in important ways. This population boasts a greater concentration of college graduates than either the region's native-born population or immigrants downstate. While some immigrants upstate may compete with U.S.-born workers for jobs, the more highly educated appear to be entering skilled occupations - in medicine, science, and research particularly - that complement those of native-born residents. Subseries: Second District Highlights.
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 ...
Journal Article
U.S. and euro-area monetary policy by regions
Even in areas that have a common currency, economic conditions can vary greatly from one region to another. So a single uniform monetary policy may not be appropriate. For example, a simple monetary policy rule at times recommends different interest rates for different regions of the United States. Among euro-area countries, such a rule typically recommends an even greater divergence in interest rates, partly due to lower labor mobility, and less use of fiscal transfers to help smooth shocks.
Working Paper
The Cross-Section of Labor Leverage and Equity Returns
Using a standard production model, we demonstrate theoretically that, even if labor is fully flexible, it generates a form of operating leverage if (a) wages are smoother than productivity and (b) the capital-labor elasticity of substitution is strictly less than one. Our model supports using labor share?the ratio of labor expenses to value added?as a proxy for labor leverage. We show evidence for conditions (a) and (b), and we demonstrate the economic significance of labor leverage: High labor-share firms have operating profits that are more sensitive to shocks, and they have higher expected ...
Journal Article
Housing busts and household mobility: an update
Interest in the relationship between household mobility and financial frictions, especially frictions associated with negative home equity, has grown following the recent boom and bust in U.S. housing markets. With prices falling 30 percent nationally, negative equity greatly expanded across many markets. More recently, the decline in mortgage rates along with various policy interventions to encourage refinancing at historically low rates suggests the need to also revisit mortgage interest rate lock-in effects, which are likely to become important once Federal Reserve interest rate policy ...
Newsletter
Strategies for improving economic mobility of workers - a conference preview
On November 15-16, 2007, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago's Economic Research Department and Consumer and Community Affairs Division, along with the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, will cosponsor a conference to present research on policies, practices, and initiatives affecting low-wage workers.
Working Paper
Cities and the growth of wages among young workers: evidence from the NLSY
Human capital-based theories of cities suggest that large, economically diverse urban agglomerations increase worker productivity by increasing the rate at which individuals acquire skills. One largely unexplored implication of this theory is that workers in big cities should see faster growth in their earnings over time than comparable workers in smaller markets. This paper examines this implication using data on a sample of young male workers drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 Cohort. The results suggest that earnings growth does tend to be faster in large, ...
Report
Propensity score matching, a distance-based measure of migration, and the wage growth of young men
This paper estimates the effect of U.S. internal migration on real wage growth between the movers' first and second jobs. Our analysis of migration differs from previous research in three important aspects. First, we exploit the confidential geocoding in the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) to obtain a distance-based measure. Second, we let the effect of migration on wage growth differ by schooling level. Third, we use propensity score matching to measure the effect of migration on the wages of those who move. ; We develop an economic model and use it to (i) assess the ...