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Working Paper
(Re-)Connecting Inflation and the Labor Market: A Tale of Two Curves
We propose an empirical framework in which shocks to worker reallocation, aggregate activity, and labor supply drive the joint dynamics of labor market outcomes and inflation, and where reallocation shocks take two forms depending on whether they result from quits or from job loss. In order to link our approach with previous theoretical and empirical work, we extend the procedure for estimating a Bayesian sign-restricted VAR so that priors can be directly imposed on the VAR's impact matrix. We find that structural shocks that shift the Beveridge curve have different effects on inflation. ...
Working Paper
Heterogeneity in the Dynamics of Disaggregate Unemployment
This paper explores the role that unobserved heterogeneity within an observed category plays in the dynamics of disaggregate unemployment and in the cross-sectional differences across individuals of the duration of unemployment spells. The distribution of unobserved heterogeneity is characterized as a mixture of two distributions with each mean and weight determined by the inflows and outflows of workers with unobserved types H and L, which are identified based on the nonlinear state-space model of Ahn and Hamilton (2016). I found that the contribution of each factor to the dynamics of ...
Discussion Paper
What do various wage measures tell us about underlying wage growth?
We develop a novel indicator of aggregate and sectoral wage inflation by leveraging multiple sources of wage data with detailed sectoral information, using a hierarchical dynamic factor model. Our empirical approach controls for data-specific measurement errors and industry-specific developments; this feature makes it particularly effective in assessing wage inflation during the Covid era, which saw increased dispersion in wage inflation across industries and larger divergences between measures of the level and trajectory of wage inflation. Our findings indicate that as the labor market has ...
Working Paper
Heterogeneity and Unemployment Dynamics
This paper develops new estimates of flows into and out of unemployment that allow for unobserved heterogeneity across workers as well as direct effects of unemployment duration on unemployment-exit probabilities. Unlike any previous paper in this literature, we develop a complete dynamic statistical model that allows us to measure the contribution of different shocks to the short-run, medium-run, and long-run variance of unemployment as well as to specific historical episodes. We find that changes in the inflows of newly unemployed are the key driver of economic recessions and identify an ...
Discussion Paper
Factors in Unemployment Dynamics
The U.S. unemployment rate averaged 8.4% during the first five years of recovery from the Great Recession of 2007-2009, the weakest recovery on record. But as the expansion continued, unemployment continued to decline and by 2018 reached the lowest levels in almost half a century. In this Note, we explore why unemployment remained so high for so long, and what factors contributed to the recent lows.
Working Paper
The Role of Observed and Unobserved Heterogeneity in the Duration of Unemployment Spells
This paper studies the degree to which observable and unobservable worker characteristics account for the variation in the aggregate duration of unemployment. I model the distribution of unobserved worker heterogeneity as time varying to capture the interaction of latent attributes with changes in labor-market conditions. Unobserved heterogeneity is the main explanation for the duration dependence of unemployment hazards. Both cyclical and low-frequency variations in the mean duration of unemployment are mainly driven by one subgroup: workers who, for unobserved reasons, stay unemployed for a ...
Working Paper
The Dual U.S. Labor Market Uncovered
Aggregate U.S. labor market dynamics are well approximated by a dual labor market supplemented with a third, predominantly, home-production segment. We uncover this structure by estimating a Hidden Markov Model, a machine-learning method. The different market segments are identified through (in-)equality constraints on labor market transition probabilities. This method yields time series of stocks and flows for the three segments for 1980-2021. Workers in the primary sector, who make up around 55 percent of the population, are almost always employed and rarely experience unemployment. The ...