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Working Paper
Are Millennials Different?
The economic wellbeing of the millennial generation, which entered its working-age years around the time of the 2007-09 recession, has received considerable attention from economists and the popular press. This chapter compares the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of millennials with those of earlier generations and compares their income, saving, and consumption expenditures. Relative to members of earlier generations, millennials are more racially diverse, more educated, and more likely to have deferred marriage; these comparisons are continuations of longer-run trends in the ...
Working Paper
Backtesting Systemic Risk Measures During Historical Bank Runs
The measurement of systemic risk is at the forefront of economists and policymakers concerns in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. What exactly are we measuring and do any of the proposed measures perform well outside the context of the recent financial crisis? One way to address these questions is to take backtesting seriously and evaluate how useful the recently proposed measures are when applied to historical crises. Ideally, one would like to look at the pre-FDIC era for a broad enough sample of financial panics to confidently assess the robustness of systemic risk measures but ...
Discussion Paper
The Young and the Carless? The Demographics of New Vehicle Purchases
A number of recent studies and press articles have documented a dramatic decline in young adults' willingness to own vehicles, particularly in the years since the 2007-09 recession.
Working Paper
Business Exit During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Non-Traditional Measures in Historical Context
Lags in official data releases have forced economists and policymakers to leverage "alternative" or "non-traditional" data to measure business exit resulting from the COVID- 19 pandemic. We first review official data on business exit in recent decades to place the alternative measures of exit within historical context. For the U.S., business exit is countercyclical and fairly common, with about 7.5 percent of firms exiting annually in recent years. Both the high level and the cyclicality of exit are driven by very small firms and establishments. We then explore a range of alternative measures ...
Working Paper
Importing, exporting and firm-level employment volatility
In this paper, we use detailed trade and transactions data for the U.S. manufacturing sector to empirically analyze the direction and magnitude of the association between firm-level exposure to trade and the volatility of employment growth. We find that, relative to purely domestic firms, firms that only export and firms that both export and import are less volatile, whereas firms that only import are more volatile. The positive relationship between importing and volatility is driven mainly by firms that switch in and out of importing. We also document a significant degree of heterogeneity ...
Discussion Paper
Annual Data on Investment and Capital Stocks
As part of the estimation of capacity for publication of its G.17 statistical release on industrial production and capacity utilization, the Federal Reserve Board produces annual information on the real capital stock and real investment for detailed industries within the manufacturing sector.
Working Paper
Offshoring bias in U.S. manufacturing: implications for productivity and value added
The rapid growth of offshoring has sparked a contentious debate over its impact on the U.S. manufacturing sector, which has recorded steep employment declines yet strong output growth--a fact reconciled by the notable gains in manufacturing productivity. We maintain, however, that the dramatic acceleration of imports from developing countries has imparted a significant bias to the official statistics. In particular, the price declines associated with the shift to low-cost foreign suppliers are generally not captured in input cost and import price indexes. Although cost savings are a primary ...
Working Paper
Outstanding outsourcers: a firm- and plant-level analysis of production sharing
This paper examines the differences in characteristics between outsourcers and non-outsourcers with a particular focus on productivity. The measure of outsourcing comes from a question in the 1987 and 1992 Census of Manufactures regarding plant-level purchases of foreign intermediate materials. There are two key findings. First, outsourcers are "outstanding." That is, all else equal, outsourcers tend to have premia for plant and firm characteristics, such as being larger, more capital intensive, and more productive. One exception to this outsourcing premia is that wages tend to be the same ...
Working Paper
Improving the Accuracy of Economic Measurement with Multiple Data Sources: The Case of Payroll Employment Data
This paper combines information from two sources of U.S. private payroll employment to increase the accuracy of real-time measurement of the labor market. The sources are the Current Employment Statistics (CES) from BLS and microdata from the payroll processing firm ADP. We briefly describe the ADP-derived data series, compare it to the BLS data, and describe an exercise that benchmarks the data series to an employment census. The CES and the ADP employment data are each derived from roughly equal-sized samples. We argue that combining CES and ADP data series reduces the measurement error ...
Discussion Paper
Who Drives Luxury Cars (Only for a While)?
Household consumption of luxury goods has attracted increasing attention in various areas of finance and economics research.