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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 ...
Journal Article
What constitutes substantial employment gains in today’s labor market?
The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) has tied its asset purchases to a ?substantial improvement? in labor market conditions. While we don?t speculate on what the FOMC means by substantial improvement, we do explore the level of monthly job gains that would gradually deliver the underlying trend unemployment rate within a reasonable timeframe, under several plausible scenarios. We find that the path of monthly job gains, which is highly dependent on a few key parameters, is likely to be smaller than the path associated with previous recoveries.
Working Paper
Lessons for forecasting unemployment in the United States: use flow rates, mind the trend
This paper evaluates the ability of autoregressive models, professional forecasters, and models that incorporate unemployment flows to forecast the unemployment rate. We pay particular attention to flows-based approaches?the more reduced-form approach of Barnichon and Nekarda (2012) and the more structural method in Tasci (2012)?to generalize whether data on unemployment flows are useful in forecasting the unemployment rate. We find that any approach that considers unemployment inflow and outflow rates performs well in the near term. Over longer forecast horizons, Tasci (2012) appears to be a ...
Journal Article
Do Longer Expansions Lead to More Severe Recessions?
We are now in one of the longest expansions on record. The recession that preceded that expansion was one of the worst in history. Are those two facts related? Some economists suggest they are, while others suggest it?s the other way around: Longer expansions lead to more severe recessions. We assess the evidence for these two hypotheses. We find clear evidence for the former and little for the latter. Deeper recessions are often followed by stronger recoveries, while longer and stronger expansions are not followed by deeper recessions.
Working Paper
Estimating the Trend Unemployment Rate in the Fourth Federal Reserve District
We estimate trend unemployment rates for Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and West Virginia, states that span parts of the Fourth District of the Federal Reserve System. Our estimated unemployment rate trend for the District as a whole stood at 5.7 percent in 2020:Q1 compared to a 4.7 percent observed unemployment rate within the District, implying a tight labor market by historical standards.
Working Paper
Diagnosing labor market search models: a multiple-shock approach
We construct a multiple-shock version of the Mortensen-Pissarides labor market search model to investigate the basic model?s well-known tendency to underpredict the volatility of key labor market variables. Data on U.S. job-finding and job separation probabilities are used to help estimate the parameters of a three-dimensional shock process comprising labor productivity, job separation, and matching or ?allocative? efficiency. Although our multiple-shock model generates some more volatility, it has counterfactual implications for the cyclicality of unemployment and vacancies. Our second ...
Working Paper
On-the-job search and labor market reallocation
This paper studies amplification of productivity shocks in labor markets through on-the-job-search. There is incomplete information about the quality of the employee-firm match which provides persistence in employment relationships and the rationale for on-the-job search. Amplification arises because productivity changes not only affect firms? probability of contacting unemployed workers but also of contacting already employed workers. Since higher productivity raises the value of all matches, even low quality matches become productive enough to survive in expansions. Therefore the measure of ...
Working Paper
Positive and normative effects of a minimum wage
We review the positive and normative effects of a minimum wage in various versions of a search-theoretic model of the labor market.
Working Paper
The Unintended Consequences of Employer Credit Check Bans on Labor and Credit Markets
Since the Great Recession, 11 states have restricted employers? access to the credit reports of job applicants. We document that county-level vacancies decline between 9.5 percent and 12.4 percent after states enact these laws. Vacancies decline significantly in affected occupations but remain constant in those that are exempt, and the decline is larger in counties with many subprime residents. Furthermore, subprime borrowers fall behind on more debt payments and reduce credit inquiries postban. The evidence suggests that, counter to their intent, employer credit check bans disrupt labor and ...
Working Paper
Diagnosing labor market search models: a multiple-shock approach
We construct a multiple shock, discrete time version of the Mortensen-Pissarides labor market search model to investigate the basic model?s well-known tendency to underpredict the volatility of key labor market variables. In addition to the standard labor productivity shock, we introduce shocks to matching effi ciency and job separation. We conduct two set of experiments. First, we estimate the joint probability distribution of shocks that simultaneously satisfy the observed data and the fi rst-order conditions of the multiple-shock model, and then simulate its properties. Although the ...