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Working Paper
What Do Data on Millions of U.S. Workers Reveal about Life-Cycle Earnings Risk?
We study the evolution of individual labor earnings over the life cycle using a large panel data set of earnings histories drawn from U.S. administrative records. Using fully nonparametric methods, our analysis reaches two broad conclusions. First, earnings shocks display substantial deviations from lognormality?the standard assumption in the incomplete markets literature. In particular, earnings shocks display strong negative skewness and extremely high kurtosis?as high as 30 compared with 3 for a Gaussian distribution. The high kurtosis implies that in a given year, most individuals ...
Working Paper
Identification Using Higher-Order Moments Restrictions
We exploit inequality restrictions on higher-order moments of the distribution of structural shocks to sharpen their identification. We show that these constraints can be treated as necessary conditions and used to shrink the set of admissible rotations. We illustrate the usefulness of this approach showing, by simulations, how it can dramatically improve the identification of monetary policy shocks when combined with widely used sign-restriction schemes. We then apply our methodology to two empirical questions: the effects of monetary policy shocks in the U.S. and the effects of sovereign ...
Working Paper
Entry and Exit, Unemployment, and Macroeconomic Tail Risk
This paper builds a nonlinear business cycle model with endogenous firm entry and exit and equilibrium unemployment. The entry and exit mechanism generates asymmetry and amplifies the transmission of productivity shocks, exposing the economy to significant tail risk. When calibrating the rates of entry and exit to match their shares of job creation and destruction, our quantitative model generates higher-order moments consistent with U.S. data. Firm exit particularly amplifies the severity and persistence of deep recessions such as the COVID-19 crisis. In the absence of entry and exit, the ...
Report
What Do Data on Millions of U.S. Workers Reveal about Life-Cycle Earnings Dynamics?
We study individual earnings dynamics over the life cycle using panel data on millions of U.S. workers. Using nonparametric methods, we first show that the distribution of earnings changes exhibits substantial deviations from lognormality, such as negative skewness and very high kurtosis. Further, the extent of these nonnormalities varies significantly with age and earnings level, peaking around age 50 and between the 70th and 90th percentiles of the earnings distribution. Second, we estimate nonparametric impulse response functions and find important asymmetries: positive changes for ...
Working Paper
Cross-Sectional Financial Conditions, Business Cycles and The Lending Channel
I document business cycle properties of the full cross-sectional distributions of U.S. stock returns and credit spreads from financial and nonfinancial firms. The skewness of returns of financial firms (SRF) best predicts economic activity, while being a barometer for lending conditions. SRF also affects firm-level investment beyond firms' balance sheets, and adverse SRF shocks lead to macroeconomic downturns with tighter lending conditions in vector autoregressions (VARs). These results are consistent with a lending channel in which cross-sectional financial firms' balance sheets play a ...
Working Paper
Dissecting Idiosyncratic Earnings Risk
This paper examines whether nonlinear and non-Gaussian features of earnings dynamics are caused by hours or hourly wages. Our findings from the Norwegian administrative and survey data are as follows: (i) Nonlinear mean reversion in earnings is driven by the dynamics of hours worked rather than wages since wage dynamics are close to linear, while hours dynamics are nonlinear—negative changes to hours are transitory, while positive changes are persistent. (ii) Large earnings changes are driven equally by hours and wages, whereas small changes are associated mainly with wage shocks. (iii) ...
Working Paper
Asset Return Dynamics under Habits and Bad-Environment Good-Environment Fundamentals
We introduce a "bad environment-good environment" (BEGE) technology for consumption growth in a consumption-based asset pricing model with external habit formation. The model generates realistic non-Gaussian features of consumption growth and fits standard salient features of asset prices including the means and volatilities of equity returns and a low risk free rate. BEGE dynamics additionally allow the model to generate realistic properties of equity index options prices, and their comovements with the macroeconomic outlook. In particular, when option implied volatility is high, as ...
Working Paper
Dissecting Idiosyncratic Earnings Risk
This paper examines whether nonlinear and non-Gaussian features of earnings dynamics are caused by hours or hourly wages. Our findings from the Norwegian administrative and survey data are as follows: (i) Nonlinear mean reversion in earnings is driven by the dynamics of hours worked rather than wages since wage dynamics are close to linear, while hours dynamics are nonlinear—negative changes to hours are transitory, while positive changes are persistent. (ii) Large earnings changes are driven equally by hours and wages, whereas small changes are associated mainly with wage shocks. (iii) ...
Working Paper
Improving Inflation Forecasts Using Robust Measures
Theory and extant empirical evidence suggest that the cross-sectional asymmetry across disaggregated price indexes might be useful in forecasting aggregate inflation. Trimmed-mean inflation estimators have been shown to be useful devices for forecasting headline PCE inflation. But is this because they signal the underlying trend or because they implicitly signal asymmetry in the underlying distribution? We address this question by augmenting a "hard" to beat benchmark headline PCE inflation forecasting model with robust trimmed-mean inflation measures and robust measures of the ...
Working Paper
Entry and Exit, Unemployment, and the Business Cycle
Establishment entry and exit is strongly correlated with output and unemployment. This paper examines how these linkages affect business cycle dynamics through the lens of a search and matching model augmented to include multi-worker establishments that endogenously enter and exit. Analytical results show cyclical entry and exit cause reallocation of inputs that amplifies and skews business cycle dynamics. When the model is calibrated to the data, it generates realistic asymmetry in output and unemployment, data-consistent counter-cyclical endogenous uncertainty and a 55% higher welfare cost ...