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Working Paper
Organizations, Skills, and Wage Inequality
We extend an on-the-job search framework in order to allow firms to hire workers with different skills and skills to interact with firms? total factor productivity (TFP). Our model implies that more productive firms are larger, pay higher wages, and hire more workers at all skill levels and proportionately more at higher skill types, matching key stylized facts. We calibrate the model using five educational attainment levels as proxies for skills and estimate nonparametrically firm-skill output from the wage distributions for different educational levels. We consider two periods in time (1985 ...
Working Paper
Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity in the United States during and after the Great Recession
Rigidity in wages has long been thought to impede the functioning of labor markets. In this paper, we investigate the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in US labor markets using job-level data from a nationally representative establishment-based compensation survey collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We use several distinct methods to test for downward nominal wage rigidity and to assess whether such rigidity is less or more severe in the presence of negative economic shocks than in more normal economic times. We find a significant amount of downward nominal wage rigidity in ...
Working Paper
Wage Setting Under Targeted Search
When setting initial compensation, some firms set a fixed, non-negotiable wage while others bargain. In this paper we propose a parsimonious search and matching model with two sided heterogeneity, where the choice of wage-setting protocol, wages, search intensity, and degree of randomness in matching are endogenous. We find that posting and bargaining coexist as wage-setting protocols if there is sufficient heterogeneity in match quality, search costs, or market tightness and that labor market tightness and relative costs of search play a key role in the choice of the wage-setting mechanism. ...
Working Paper
Wage dynamics and labor market transitions: a reassessment through total income and “usual” wages
We present a simple on-the-job search model in which workers can receive shocks to their employer-specific c productivity match. Because the firm-specific match can vary, wages may increase or decrease over time at each employer. Therefore, for some workers, job-to-job transitions are a way to escape job situations that worsened over time. The contribution of our paper relies on our novel approach to identifying the presence of the shock to the match specific productivity. The presence two independent measures of workers compensation in our dataset of is crucial for our identification ...
Working Paper
Income Volatility and Portfolio Choices
Based on administrative data from Statistics Norway, we find economically significant shifts in households' financial portfolios around structural breaks in income volatility. When the standard deviation of labor-income growth doubles, the share of risky assets decreases by 4 percentage points. We ask whether this estimated marginal effect is consistent with a standard model of portfolio choice with idiosyncratic volatility shocks. The standard model generates a much more aggressive portfolio response than we see in the data. We show that Bayesian learning about the underlying volatility ...
Journal Article
Work, Leisure, and Family: From the Silent Generation to Millennials
This article analyzes the changes in family structure, fertility behavior, and the division of labor within the household from the Silent generation (cohort born in 1940-49) to the Millennial generation (cohort born in 1980-89). Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this article documents the main trends and life-cycle profiles for each generation. The main findings are that (i) the wage-age profile has been shifting down over generations, especially for Millennial men; (ii) the returns to a four-year college degree or higher for men have increased for all generations; (iii) ...
Working Paper
Wage Setting Under Targeted Search
When setting initial compensation, some firms set a fixed, non-negotiable wage while others bargain. In this paper we propose a parsimonious search and matching model with two sided heterogeneity, where the choice of wage-setting protocol, wages, search intensity, and degree of randomness in matching are endogenous. We find that posting and bargaining coexist as wage-setting protocols if there is sufficient heterogeneity in match quality, search costs, or market tightness and that labor market tightness and relative costs of search play a key role in the choice of the wage-setting mechanism. ...
Discussion Paper
Wage Pressures in the Labor Market: What Do They Say?
Wage pressures among the newly employed in low-wage service occupations appearto be the result of normal economic forces, likely reflecting demand surges for—and areluctant supply of—workers in occupations particularly hard hit by pandemic-inducedeconomic shutdowns.
Working Paper
Recent Employment Growth in Cities, Suburbs, and Rural Communities
This paper uses a comprehensive source of yearly data to study private-sector labor demand across US counties during the past five decades. Our focus is on how employment levels and earnings relate to population density—that is, how labor markets in rural areas, suburbs, and cities have fared relative to one another. Three broad lessons emerge. First, the longstanding suburbanization of employment and population in cities with very dense urban cores essentially stopped in the first decade of the 21st century. For cities with less dense cores, however, the decentralization of employment ...
Discussion Paper
Valuing Workplace Benefits
Workplace benefits—such as parental leave, sick leave, and flexible work arrangements—are increasingly being recognized as important determinants of differences in labor supply behavior, education and occupation choice, inequality in wages, and gender disparities in labor market outcomes. Researchers have argued that the failure of the United States to keep pace in providing more generous workplace benefits accounts for 29 percent of the decline in the nation’s labor force participation rate for women relative to that of other high-income countries in the Organisation for Economic ...