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Working Paper
Revisiting Capital-Skill Complementarity, Inequality, and Labor Share
This paper revisits capital-skill complementarity and inequality, as in Krusell, Ohanian, Rios-Rull and Violante (KORV, 2000). Using their methodology, we study how well the KORV model accounts for more recent data, including the large changes in the labor's share of income that were not present in KORV. We study both labor share of gross income (as in KORV), and income net of depreciation. We also use nonfarm business sector output as an alternative measure of production to real GDP. We find strong evidence for continued capital-skill complementarity in the most recent data, and we also find ...
Journal Article
When the bubble bursts: psychology or fundamentals?
The prices of stocks, bonds, and other assets frequently fluctuate, and sometimes these fluctuations are quite large. Such price shifts have important economic implications, including the possibility that asset prices have predictive power for the business cycle. In this article, Lee Ohanian analyzes the volatility of security prices and discusses whether movements in asset prices reflect changes in the fundamental value of the asset or whether extreme price changes may be associated with changes in market psychology
Report
Pay with Promises or Pay as You Go? Lessons from the Death Spiral of Detroit
As part of compensation, municipal employees typically receive promises of future benefits. Motivated by the recent bankruptcy of Detroit, we develop a model of the equilibrium size of a city and use it to analyze how pay-with-promises schemes interact with city growth. The paper examines the circumstances under which a death spiral arises, where cutbacks of city services and increases in taxes lead to an exodus of residents, compounding financial distress. The model is put to work to analyze issues such as the welfare effects of having cities absorb pension risk and how unions affect the ...
Report
Re-examining the contributions of money and banking shocks to the U.S. Great Depression
This paper quantitatively evaluates the hypothesis that deflation can account for much of the Great Depression (1929?33). We examine two popular explanations of the Depression: (1) The ?high wage? story, according to which deflation, combined with imperfectly flexible wages, raised real wages and reduced employment and output. (2) The ?bank failure? story, according to which deflationary money shocks contributed to bank failures and to a reduction in the efficiency of financial intermediation, which in turn reduced lending and output. We evaluate these stories using general equilibrium ...
Working Paper
New Deal policies and the persistence of the Great Depression: a general equilibrium analysis
There are two striking aspects of the recovery from the Great Depression in the United States: the recovery was very weak and real wages in several sectors rose significantly above trend. These data contrast sharply with neoclassical theory, which predicts a strong recovery with low real wages. We evaluate the contribution of New Deal cartelization policies designed to limit competition and increase labor bargaining power to the persistence of the Depression. We develop a model of the bargaining process between labor and firms that occurred with these policies, and embed that model within a ...
Journal Article
Are Phillips curves useful for forecasting inflation?
This study evaluates the conventional wisdom that modern Phillips curve-based models are useful tools for forecasting inflation. These models are based on the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment (the NAIRU). The study compares the accuracy, over the last 15 years, of three sets of inflation forecasts from NAIRU models to the naive forecast that at any date inflation will be the same over the next year as it has been over the last year. The conventional wisdom is wrong; none of the NAIRU forecasts is more accurate than the naive forecast. The likelihood of accurately predicting a ...
Working Paper
Foreclosure delay and U.S. unemployment
Through a purely positive lens, we study and document the growing trend of mortgagors who skip mortgage payments as an extra source of "informal" unemployment insurance during the 2007 recession and the subsequent recovery. In a dynamic model, we capture this behavior by treating both delinquency and foreclosure not as one period events, but rather as protracted and potentially reversible episodes that influence job search behavior and wage acceptance decisions. With a relatively conservative parameterization, we find that the observed foreclosure delays increase the unemployment rate by an ...
Discussion Paper
Foreclosure Delay and the U.S. Labor Market
The time required to complete a home foreclosure rose substantially during the Great Recession, due both to lender bottlenecks in processing foreclosures and to government policies intended to slow the foreclosure process. This paper shows that foreclosure delay had the unintentional benefit of giving unemployed homeowners additional time to search for high-paying jobs. {{p}} Our economic model analyzes foreclosure delay as equivalent to extending additional credit to unemployed homeowners that is paid back if the homeowners find jobs and fulfill their delinquent mortgage obligations before ...
Discussion Paper
Paychecks or Promises? Lessons from the Death Spiral of Detroit
Pay-with-promises compensation plans accumulate liability for future employee benefits, such as retiree health insurance. A simple economic model demonstrates that such plans can exacerbate fiscal crises faced by cities that experience external economic shocks, such as the departure of a major employer. City leaders often raise taxes and/or reduce public services to pay off legacy employee debts, and such steps encourage residents to move out, reducing the tax base and raising fiscal stress. Pay-as-you-go compensation plans are more prudent; they settle liabilities to employees paycheck by ...
Journal Article
Theoretical issues of liquidity effects.