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Journal Article
Will electricity deregulation push inflation lower?
Deregulation of electricity generation will offer consumers many advantages, including dramatically lower energy costs. From a macroeconomic viewpoint, electricity purchases are interesting because they are a major component of consumers? budgets (and thus of the CPI) and a large factor of production for many companies. This raises the possibility that electricity deregulation could create a substantial shock to the overall price trend, comparable to other recent energy shocks. The benefits to consumers and producers identified in this article strongly support legislative efforts to increase ...
Journal Article
Productivity gains: how permanent?
This Economic Commentary confirms that productivity growth has been unusually robust over the last few years and explores reasonable assumptions about the likely future pattern of productivity growth. These assumptions can generate substantially different productivity growth paths. Government forecasts, which guide the major tax and benefit programs, have been increased in recent years yet remain cautious.
Report
How wages change: micro evidence from the international wage flexibility project
How do the complex institutions involved in wage setting affect wage changes? The International Wage Flexibility Project provides new microeconomic evidence on how wages change for continuing workers. We analyze individuals' earnings in thirty-one different data sets from sixteen countries, from which we obtain a total of 360 wage change distributions. We find a remarkable amount of variation in wage changes across workers. Wage changes have a notably non-normal distribution; they are tightly clustered around the median and also have many extreme values. Furthermore, nearly all countries show ...
Working Paper
Sectoral wage convergence: a nonparametric distributional analysis
A nonparametric analysis of the similarity between goods and services wage densities, applying kernel density estimates and an overlap statistic to U.S. weekly full-time wages from 1969 to 1993.
Journal Article
Employment surveys are telling the same (sad) story
Two government surveys are used to gather information about employment in the U.S. economy, but the employment levels calculated from each seem to provide conflicting pictures of the labor market. The surveys are very different, but when the differences are taken into account and the survey results are compared with their respective business-cycle patterns, the conflict disappears.
Journal Article
What constitutes substantial employment gains in today’s labor market?
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has tied its asset purchases to a ?substantial improvement? in labor market conditions. While we don?t speculate on what the FOMC means by substantial improvement, we do explore the level of monthly job gains that would gradually deliver the underlying trend unemployment rate within a reasonable timeframe, under several plausible scenarios. We find that the path of monthly job gains, which is highly dependent on a few key parameters, is likely to be smaller than the path associated with previous recoveries.
Journal Article
Paths to prosperity: knowledge is key for Fourth District states
Even as per capita income has increased across the United States, differences among states? incomes remain. What are the sources of these remaining differences? This Commentary identifies and analyzes the key factors?patents, educational attainment, and industry structure?that influence income-growth rates and thus per capita incomes. It also explores where the Fourth District falls in relation to other states and the country as a whole.
Journal Article
Economic policy uncertainty and small business expansion
Is uncertainty causing small business owners to behave in ways that are hindering the recovery? That question is at the center of an intense public debate. Though reasonable arguments have been presented on both sides, there is not much empirical evidence to draw on. To contribute some to the discussion, we investigated the statistical association between data on small business plans to hire and make capital expenditures and a measure of policy uncertainty. Our analysis suggests that uncertainty is adversely affecting small business owners? expansion plans.
Journal Article
Which Industries Received PPP Loans?
We examine the financial challenges faced by small businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic and estimate the scale of loans provided to small businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program. We find that the program reached businesses throughout the economy, and we estimate that small businesses in most industry sectors received loans equivalent to between 80 percent and 120 percent of 10 weeks of their 2017 payrolls. That said, there are important differences in the distribution of funds across sectors that suggest some businesses had problems accessing loans and that a significant number ...
Journal Article
Alternatives to Libor in consumer mortgages
Many adjustable rate mortgages in the United States are indexed to Libor. While the accuracy of this rate has recently been called into question, another issue affecting U.S. borrowers has become evident since the onset of the financial crisis. Specifically, many U.S. consumers with Libor-based loans may have been hit with substantially higher payments when their loans reset during the financial crisis than if those loans had been tied to a Treasury rate. We investigate several alternative reference rates for consumer loans and estimate their payment effects on a large sample of Libor-linked ...