Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis working papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critial comment.
Labor Force Exiters around Recessions: Who Are They?
This paper identifies workers who experience a job separation during a recession and tracks their labor force status in the following year using the Current Population Survey. Workers are classified as exiters if they leave the labor force shortly after their job loss and non-exiters if they do not. The pool of exiters is disproportionately female, less-educated, and older. During the pandemic recession, there were even more older workers in the exiters pool, although they were less likely to report being retired compared to in the Great Recession. In addition, statuses were more persistent during the Great Recession: for both exiters and non-exiters the majority were in the same labor force status a year later. I then use the patterns of these samples of job-separators to estimate the propensity of being re-employed in a year and apply the estimates to the general out-of-work pools during the two recessions. I find that changes in the likelihood of being re-employed as well as the composition of individuals out of work are important for understanding the differences between the labor market in the two recessions.
Causes and Consequences of Student-College Mismatch
What are the tradeoffs of meritocratic college admissions? On one hand, stronger sorting between students and colleges may produce more human capital on aggregate if higher ability students benefit more from attending higher quality colleges. On the other hand, stronger sorting generates a higher degree of earnings inequality and reduces upward mobility. In this paper, we examine student-college sorting and study aggregate implications of redistributive college admissions policies such as affirmative action. To this end, we develop a model with heterogeneous students and college types that differ on human capital production technology and financial costs/subsidies. We quantify our model using NLSY97 student-level and college transcript data, as well as quasi-experimental evidence on returns to college quality and relevance of information provision. Our quantitative model implies small efficiency losses from redistributive college admissions policies such as affirmative action based on socioeconomic status.
The Evolution of Lifetime Hours and the Gender Wage Gap
The gender wage gap decreased (opened) from 1940 to 1975 and then increased (closed) until 2010. We use the model introduced in Ben-Porath (1967) to assess the role of gender differences in life cycle profiles of market time in explaining this dynamics. Men's profiles changed little across cohorts, but women's profiles converged to that of men implying, eventually, stronger incentives for women to accumulate human capital. We calibrate the model and find that (1) The 1940-75 decrease of the gap was because men valued human capital more than women due to their working more. The 1975-10 increase was because men's valuation of human capital remain mostly unchanged while women's increased. (2) If men had the hours profiles of women, the wage gap would have closed continuously since 1940 (ceteris paribus), but its level in 2010 would be close to its observed level.
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) Both wages and hours contribute to negative skewness and high kurtosis for earnings changes, although hour-wage interactions are quantitatively more important. (iv) When considering household earnings and disposable household income, the deviations from normality are mitigated relative to individual labor earnings: changes in disposable household income are approximately symmetric and less leptokurtic.
Voluntary participation in a terror group and counterterrorism policy
A three-stage game investigates how counterterrorism measures are affected by volunteers’ choice in joining a terrorist group. In stage 1, the government chooses both proactive and defensive countermeasures, while looking ahead to the anticipated size and actions of terrorist groups. After radicalized individuals choose whether to join a terrorist group in stage 2, group members then allocate their time between work and terrorist operations. Based on wages and government counterterrorism, the game characterizes the extensive margin determining group size and the intensive margin indicating the group’s level of attacks. Comparative statics show how changes in wages or radicalization impact the optimal mix between defensive and proactive countermeasures. Higher (lower) wages favor a larger (smaller) mix of proactive measures over defensive actions. In the absence of backlash, enhanced radicalization of terrorist members calls for a greater reliance on defensive actions. The influence of backlash on counterterrorism is also examined.
Liquidity and Investment in General Equilibrium
This paper studies how trading frictions in financial markets impact firms’ investment and dividend policies, and explores its aggregate consequences. When equity shares trade in frictional asset markets, the firm’s problem is time-inconsistent, and it is as if it faces quasi-hyperbolic discounting. The transmission of trading frictions to the real economy crucially depends on the firms’ ability to commit. In a calibrated economy without commitment, larger trading frictions imply lower capital. In contrast, if firms can commit, trading frictions affect asset prices but have little effect on aggregate capital. Our findings rationalize several empirical regularities on liquidity and investment.
This study introduces a dual vacancy model to explain the recent anomalous behavior of the Beveridge curve. The model proposes that job vacancies are partitioned into two categories, one for the unemployed and the other for job-to-job transitions, and that they function in separate markets. We estimate the monthly numbers of both job vacancy types for the U.S. economy and its subsectors starting from 2000 and find a significant surge in poaching vacancies in the mid-2010s. Our analysis indicates that the dual vacancy model provides a better fit to the data than traditional models. These findings suggest that a deceleration in worker demand can have a reduced impact on unemployment, with implications for monetary policy.
This paper provides quantitative evidence on interbank transmission of financial distress in the Panic of 1907 and ensuing recession. Originating in New York City, the panic led to payment suspensions and emergency currency issuance in many cities. Data on the universe of interbank connections show that i) suspension was more likely in cities whose banks had closer ties to banks at the center of the panic, ii) banks with such links were more likely to close in the panic and recession, and iii) banks responded to the panic by rearranging their correspondent relationships, with implications for network structure.
Demand-Supply imbalance during the COVID-19 pandemic: The role of fiscal policy
To mitigate the health and economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, governments worldwide engaged in massive fiscal support programs. We show that generous fiscal support is associated with an increase in the demand for consumption goods during the pandemic, but industrial production did not adjust quickly enough to meet the sharp increase in demand. This imbalance between supply and demand across countries contributed to high inflation. Our findings suggest a sizable role for fiscal policy in affecting price stability, above and beyond what a monetary authority can do.
Policy Rules and Large Crises in Emerging Markets
Emerging economies have adopted fiscal and monetary rules to discipline government policy. We study the value and macroeconomic implications of rules and flexibility within a sovereign-default model that incorporates domestic fiscal and monetary policies and long-term external debt. Adopting monetary targets and debt limits during normal times yields welfare gains. Suspending rules can significantly influence policy, macroeconomic outcomes, and welfare during large, unforeseen crises. The gains from flexibility depend on how quickly policymakers are able to reimpose rules after the crisis.
Shipping Prices and Import Price Inflation
During the pandemic there have been unprecedented increases in the cost of shipping goods accompanied by delays and backlogs at the ports. At the same time, import price inflation has reached levels unseen since the early 1980s. This has led many to speculate that the two trends are linked. In this article, we use new data on the price of shipping goods between countries to analyze the extent to which increases in the price of shipping can account for the increase in U.S. import price inflation. We find that the pass-through of shipping costs is small. Nevertheless, because the rise in shipping prices has been so extreme, it can account for between 3.60 and 5.87 percentage points per year of the increase in import price inflation during the post-Pandemic period.
Labor Market Shocks and Monetary Policy
We develop a heterogeneous agent New Keynesian model featuring a frictional labor market with on-the-job search to quantitatively study the positive and normative implications of employer-to-employer (EE) transitions for inflation. We find that EE dynamics played an important role in shaping the differential inflation dynamics observed during the Great Recession and COVID-19 recoveries, with the former exhibiting subdued EE transitions and inflation despite both episodes sharing similar unemployment dynamics. The optimal monetary policy prescribes a strong positive response to EE fluctuations, implying that central banks should distinguish between recovery episodes with similar unemployment but different EE dynamics.
Age and Gender Differentials in Unemployment and Hysteresis
We use a time-varying panel unobserved components model to estimate unemployment gaps disaggregated by age and gender. Recessions before COVID affected men's labor market outcomes more than women's; however, the reverse was true for the COVID recession, with effects amplified for younger workers. The aggregate Phillips curve flattens over time and hysteresis is countercyclical for all groups. We find heterogeneity in both the Phillips curve and hysteresis coefficients, with wages responding more to workers with an outside option (high school- and retirement-age) and larger effects of hysteresis for younger workers.
The Sine Aggregatio Approach to Applied Macro
We develop a method to use disaggregate data to conduct causal inference in macroeconomics. The approach permits one to infer the aggregate effect of a macro treatment using regional outcome data and a valid instrument. We estimate a macro effect without (sine) the aggregation (aggregatio) of the outcome variable. We exploit cross-equation parameter restrictions to increase precision relative to traditional, aggregate series estimates and provide a method to assess robustness to departures from these restrictions. We illustrate our method via estimating the jobs effect of oil price changes using regional manufacturing employment data and an aggregate oil supply shock.
Private Information and Optimal Infant Industry Protection
We study infant industry protection using a dynamic model in which the industry's cost is initially higher than that of foreign competitors. The industry can stochastically lower its cost via learning by doing. Whether the industry has transitioned to low cost is private information. Using a mechanism-design approach, we solve for the optimal protection policy that induces the industry to reveal its true cost. We show that (i) the optimal protection, measured by infant industry output, declines over time and is less than that under public information, (ii) the optimal protection policy is time consistent under public information but not under private information, (iii) eventual viability of the infant industry is neither necessary nor sufficient for the optimal protection under private information, and (iv) the optimal protection policy can be implemented with minimal information requirements. We also deliver a one-dimensional metric to rank industries to help a government with a limited budget to choose which industries to protect.
Economists have recently begun using independent online surveys to collect national labor market data. Questions remain over the quality of such data. This paper provides an approach to address these concerns. Our case study is the Real-Time Population Survey (RPS), a novel online survey of the US built around the Current Population Survey (CPS). The RPS replicates core components of the CPS, ensuring comparable measures that allow us to weight and rigorously validate our results using a high-quality benchmark. At the same time, special questions in the RPS yield novel information regarding employer reallocation during the COVID-19 pandemic. We document that 26% of pre-pandemic workers were working for a new employer one year into the COVID-19 outbreak in the US, at least double the rate of any previous episode in the past quarter century. Our discussion contains practical suggestions for the design of novel labor market surveys and highlights other promising applications of our methodology.
In 1936-37, the Federal Reserve doubled member banks' reserve requirements. Friedman and Schwartz (1963) famously argued that the doubling increased reserve demand and forced the money supply to contract, which they argued caused the recession of 1937-38. Using a new database on individual banks, we show that higher reserve requirements did not generally increase banks' reserve demand or contract lending because reserve requirements were not binding for most banks. Aggregate effects on credit supply from reserve requirement increases were therefore economically small and statistically zero.
The Jobs Effect of Ending Pandemic Unemployment Benefits: A State-Level Analysis
This paper uses the asynchronous cessation of emergency unemployment benefits (EUB) in 2021 to investigate the jobs impact of ending unemployment benefits. While some states stopped providing EUB in September, others stopped as early as June. Using the cessation month as an instrument, we estimate the effect on employment of reducing unemployment rolls. In the second month following a state’s program termination, for every 100 person reduction in beneficiaries, state employment causally increased by about 27 persons. The effect is statistically different from zero and robust to a wide array of alternative specifications.
The Ramsey Steady-State Conundrum in Heterogeneous-Agent Economies
This paper makes two fundamental contributions: (i) We prove that the interior Ramsey steady state commonly assumed in the literature may not exist in a standard Aiyagari model-in particular, a steady state with the modified golden rule and a positive capital tax is shown to be feasible but not optimal. (ii) We design a modified, analytically tractable version of the standard Aiyagari model to reveal the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the existence of a Ramsey steady state. We characterize the basic properties of both interior and non-interior Ramsey steady states and show that researchers may draw fundamentally misleading conclusions about optimal fiscal policy (such as the optimal capital tax rate) from their analysis if an interior Ramsey steady state is incorrectly assumed.
Work from Home Before and After the COVID-19 Outbreak
Based on novel survey data, we document a persistent rise in work from home (WFH) over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using theory and direct survey evidence, we argue that three quarters of this increase reflects adoption of new work arrangements that will likely be permanent for many workers. A quantitative model matched to survey data predicts that twice as many workers will WFH full-time post-pandemic compared to pre-pandemic, and that one in every five instead of seven workdays will be WFH. These model predictions are consistent with survey evidence on workers' own expectations about WFH in the future.
Politically influenced counterterrorism policy and welfare efficiency
The paper examines how two targeted countries strategically deploy their counterterror forces when lobbying defense firms influence counterterror provision. For proactive measures, lobbying activities in a single targeted country lessen underprovision, raise overall counterterrorism, and reduce terrorism. Welfare decreases in the politically influenced country but increases in the other targeted country owing to enhanced free riding. Lobbying influence on the targeted countries’ welfare is tied to terrorists’ targeting preferences and how the lobbied government weighs citizens’ welfare. For key parametric values, lobbying in both targeted countries may result in the first-best equilibrium. With two-country lobbying, international policy coordination by at-risk governments may lead, surprisingly, to less efficient outcomes than the noncooperative equilibrium. Additionally, lobby-influenced defensive countermeasures generally affect efficiency adversely.
Structural Change in Labor Supply and Cross-Country Differences in Hours Worked
This paper studies how structural change in labor supply along the development spectrum shapes cross-country differences in hours worked. We emphasize two main forces: sectoral reallocation from self-employment to wage work, and declining fixed costs of wage work. We show that these forces are crucial for understanding how the extensive margin (the employment rate) and intensive margin (hours per worker) of aggregate hours worked vary with income per capita. To do so we build and estimate a quantitative model of labor supply featuring a traditional self-employment sector and a modern wage-employment sector. When estimated to match cross-country data, the model predicts that sectoral reallocation explains more than half of the total hours decrease at lower levels of development. Declining fixed costs drive the rise in employment rates at higher levels of income per capita, and imply higher hours in the future, in contrast to the lower hours resulting from income effects and expansions in tax-and-transfer systems.
We document two robust features of the cross-sectional distribution of usual weekly hours and hourly wages. First, usual weekly hours are heavily concentrated around 40 hours, while at the same time a substantial share of total hours come from individuals who work more than 50 hours. Second, mean hourly wages are non-monotonic across the usual hours distribution, with a peak at 50 hours. We develop and estimate a model of labor supply to account for these features. The novel feature of our model is that earnings are non-linear in hours, with the extent of nonlinearity varying over the hours distribution. Our estimates imply significant wage penalties for individuals that deviate from 40 hours in either direction, leading to a large mass of individuals that work 40 hours and are not very responsive to shocks. This has important implications for the role of labor supply as a mechanism for self-insurance in a standard heterogeneous agent-incomplete markets model and for empirical strategies designed to estimate labor supply parameters.
Attention and Fluctuations in Macroeconomic Uncertainty
I show that economic agents’ attention to macroeconomic events can increase macroeconomic uncertainty during recessions. Agents face uncertainty about the aggregate state of the economy, receive dispersed information about it, and can pay attention to acquire more information. When the economy is in a bad state, agents choose to pay more attention, and their collective response increases three common measures of uncertainty: (i) aggregate output volatility, (ii) forecast dispersion about output, and (iii) subjective uncertainty about output. Uncertainty driven by agents’ attention implies an empirical pattern of expectation updates consistent with evidence from forecast surveys and distinct from that generated by exogenous volatility shocks. When calibrated to U.S. forecast surveys, countercyclical attention accounts for half of the observed fluctuations in the three measures of uncertainty. To capture fluctuations in attention and uncertainty, I developed a method to solve higher-order dynamics of dispersed information models under an infinite regress problem.
On the Real-Time Predictive Content of Financial Conditions Indices for Growth
We provide evidence on the real-time predictive content of the National Financial Conditions Index (NFCI), for conditional quantiles of U.S. real GDP growth. Our work is distinct from the literature in two specific ways. First, we construct (unofficial) real-time vintages of the NFCI. This allows us to conduct out-of-sample analysis without introducing the kind of look-ahead biases that are naturally introduced when using a single current vintage. We then develop methods for conducting asymptotic inference on tests of equal tick loss between nested quantile regression models when the data are subject to revision. We conclude by evaluating the real-time predictive content of NFCI vintages for quantiles of real GDP growth. While our results largely reinforce the literature, we find gains to using real-time vintages leading up to recessions — precisely when policymakers need such a monitoring device.
Anatomy of Lifetime Earnings Inequality: Heterogeneity in Job Ladder Risk vs. Human Capital
We study the determinants of lifetime earnings (LE) inequality in the U.S. by focusing on latent heterogeneity in job ladder dynamics and on-the-job learning as sources of wage growth differentials. Using administrative data, we find (i) more frequent job switches among lower LE workers, mainly driven by nonemployment spells, (ii) little heterogeneity in average annual earnings growth of job stayers in the bottom two-thirds of the LE distribution, and (iii) an earnings growth for job switchers that rises strongly with LE. We estimate a structural model featuring a rich set of worker types and firm heterogeneity. We find vast differences in ex-ante job ladder risk—job loss, job finding, and contact rates—across workers. These differences account for 75% of the lifetime wage growth differential among the bottom half of the LE distribution. Above the median, almost all lifetime wage growth differences are a result of Pareto-distributed learning ability.
Reconsidering the Fed's Inflation Forecasting Advantage
Previous studies show the Fed has a forecast advantage over the private sector for inflation, either because it devotes more resources to forecasting or because it has an informational advantage. We evaluate the Fed's forecast advantage to determine how much of it results from the Fed's knowledge of future monetary policy. We develop two tests -- an instrumental variable encompassing test and a path-dependent encompassing test -- to equalize the Fed's information set with the private sector's. We find that Fed forecasts do not encompass those of the private sector when the latter has knowledge of the future of monetary policy. Further, we find that between 20 and 30 percent of the difference between the Fed's and the private sector's mean squared forecast error can be explained by monetary policy.
Earnings Dynamics and Its Intergenerational Transmission: Evidence from Norway
Using administrative data, we provide an extensive characterization of labor earnings dynamics in Norway. Some of our findings are as follows. (i) Norway has not been immune to the increase in top earnings inequality seen in other countries. (ii) The earnings distribution compresses in the bottom 90% over the life cycle but expands in the top 10%. (iii) The earnings growth distribution is left skewed and leptokurtic, and the extent of these nonnormalities varies with age and past income. Linking individuals to their parents, we also investigate the intergenerational transmission of income dynamics. We find that children of high-income, high-wealth fathers enjoy steeper income growth over the life cycle and face more volatile but more positively skewed income changes, suggesting that they are more likely to pursue high-return, high-risk careers. Income growth for children of poorer fathers is more gradual and more left skewed, displaying higher left tail risk. Furthermore, the income dynamics of fathers and children are strongly correlated: children of fathers with steeper life-cycle income growth, more volatile incomes, or higher downside risk also have income streams of similar properties. These findings shed new light on the determinants of intergenerational mobility.
International trade and labor reallocation: misclassification errors, mobility, and switching costs
International trade has increased at a rapid pace in the last decades, altering production and labor demand in different sectors of the economy. The estimated effects of trade on employment and welfare critically depend on data about workers’ reallocation patterns, which is typically plagued with coding errors. I show that the estimated employment and welfare effects of international trade, and the estimated structural parameters of standard models are biased when the analysis uses data subject to misclassification errors. I develop an econometric framework to estimate misclassification probabilities, corrected mobility matrices, and structural parameters, and show that the estimated employment and welfare effects of a trade shock are different from those estimated with uncorrected data, raising an important warning about conclusions drawn from data with coding errors.
Paving the Road for Replications: Experimental Results from an Online Research Bibliography
Are users of a bibliographic database interested in learning about replications? Can they be induced to learn? To answer these questions, we performed an experiment at the online research bibliography, RePEc (Research Papers in Economics). RePEc is the main research bibliography for pre-prints and published papers in economics. Using randomized stratification, we allocated 324 replications and their corresponding original studies to clusters. We then drew from those clusters to construct treatment and control groups. Brightly colored tabs were added to the relevant webpages to alert visitors to the existence of a replication study. We then monitored traffic over three phases lasting several months: a) no treatment, b) treatment on one group, c) treatment on both groups. Our estimates indicate that this intervention generated an average click-through-rate (CTR) of 1.6%, resulting in a 13% increase in the visits to replication webpages, though only the former estimate was statistically significant.
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