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Journal Article
Where Are the Workers? A Look into the Decline in Immigration
The number of missing workers in the US labor force peaked at 2.58 million in June 2020 during the pandemic, but immigration restrictions are likely not the main driver of the high vacancy-to-unemployment ratio.
Journal Article
Childhood Income Volatility
Rising volatility in family income suggests that government efforts such as the monthly payment of the child tax credit may be appropriate.
Journal Article
Inflation and Shipping Costs
Imports that are more reliant on ocean freight have seen higher import price inflation since the start of the pandemic.
How Income Volatility Affects Food Volatility
Family income volatility can affect children negatively in the long term, but it can also determine how much parents are able to spend on food.
Journal Article
Business Dynamism and City Size
Business dynamism has been decreasing since the 1980s, but less so for larger cities.
Working Paper
The Role of Establishment Size in the City-Size Earnings Premium
Both large establishments and large cities are known to offer workers an earnings premium. In this paper, we show that these two premia are closely linked by documenting a new fact: when workers move to a large city, they also move to larger establishments. We then ask how much of the city- size earnings premium can be attributed to transitions to larger and better-paying establishments. Using administrative data from Spain, we find that 38 percent of the city-size earnings premium can be explained by establishment-size composition. Most of the gains from the transition to larger ...
Working Paper
The Impact of Racial Segregation on College Attainment in Spatial Equilibrium
We incorporate race into an overlapping-generations spatial-equilibrium model with neighborhood spillovers. Race matters in two ways: (i) the Black-White wage gap and (ii) homophily—the preferences of individuals over the racial composition of their neighborhood. We find that these two forces generate a Black-White college gap of 22 percentage points, explaining about 80% of the college gap in the data for the St. Louis metro area. Counterfactual exercises show that the wage gap and homophily explain 7 and 18 percentage points of the college gap, respectively. A policy of equalizing school ...
Working Paper
Where Did the Workers Go? The Effect of COVID Immigration Restrictions on Post-Pandemic Labor Market Tightness
During the COVID pandemic there were unprecedented shortfalls in immigration. At the same time, during the economic recovery, the labor market was tight, with the number of vacancies per unemployed worker reaching 2.5, more than twice its pre-pandemic average. In this paper, we investigate whether these two trends are linked. We do not find evidence to support the hypothesis that the immigration shortfalls caused the tight labor market for two reasons. First, at the peak, we were missing about 2 million immigrant workers, but this number had largely recovered by February 2022 just as the ...
Working Paper
The Geography of Business Dynamism and Skill Biased Technical Change
This paper seeks to explain several key components of the growing regional disparities in the U.S. since 1980: big cities saw a larger increase in the relative wages and relative supply of skilled workers, and a smaller decline in business dynamism. These trends can be explained by differences across cities in the extent to which firms adopt new skill-biased technologies. With the introduction of a new skill-biased, high fixed cost but low marginal cost technology, firms endogenously adopt more in big cities, cities that offer abundant amenities for high-skilled workers and cities that ...
Working Paper
Inequality in the Welfare Costs of Disinflation
We use an incomplete markets economy to quantify the distribution of welfare gains and losses of the US "Volcker" disinflation. In the long run households prefer low inflation, but disinflation requires a transition period and a redistribution from net nominal borrowers to net nominal savers. Even with perfectly flexible prices, welfare costs may be significant for households with nominal liabilities. When calibrated to match the micro and macro moments of the early 1980s high inflation environment, almost half of all borrowers (14 percent of all households) would prefer to avoid the ...