Search Results
Journal Article
How Accurate Are Long-Run Employment Projections?
The occupational mix has been changing for decades. Planners and decision makers need to know how it will continue to change, and why.
Report
The topology of the federal funds market
The recent turmoil in global financial markets underscores the importance of the federal funds market as a means of distributing liquidity throughout the financial system and a tool for implementing monetary policy. In this paper, we explore the network topology of the federal funds market. We find that the network is sparse, exhibits the small-world phenomenon, and is disassortative. In addition, reciprocity loans track the federal funds rate, and centrality measures are useful predictors of the interest rate of a loan.
Working Paper
Micro- and Macroeconomic Impacts of a Place-Based Industrial Policy
We investigate the impact of a set of place-based subsidies introduced in Turkey in 2012. Using firm-level balance-sheet data along with data on the domestic production network, we first assess the policy’s direct and indirect impacts. We find an increase in economic activity in industry-province pairs that were the focus of the subsidy program, and positive spillovers to the suppliers and customers of subsidized firms. With the aid of a dynamic multi-region, multi-industry general equilibrium model, we then assess the program’s impacts. Based on the calibrated model, we find that, in the ...
Report
Quantifying the benefits of a liquidity-saving mechanism
This paper attempts to quantify the benefits associated with operating a liquidity-saving mechanism (LSM) in Fedwire, the large-value payment system of the Federal Reserve. Calibrating the model of Martin and McAndrews (2008), we find that potential gains are large compared to the likely cost of implementing an LSM, on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars per day.
Working Paper
Accounting for the Sources of Macroeconomic Tail Risks
Using a multi-industry real business cycle model, we empirically examine the microeconomic origins of aggregate tail risks. Our model, estimated using industry-level data from 1972 to 2016, indicates that industry-specific shocks account for most of the third and fourth moments of GDP growth.
Working Paper
Post-Merger Product Repositioning: An Empirical Analysis
This paper investigates firms’ post-merger product repositioning. We compile information on conglomerate firms’ additions and removals of products for a sample of 61 mergers and acquisitions across a wide variety of consumer packaged goods markets. We find that mergers lead to a net reduction in the number of products offered by the merging firms, and the products that are dropped tend to be particularly dissimilar to the firms’ existing products. These results are consistent with theories of the firm that emphasize core competencies linked to particular segments of the product market.
Working Paper
Quality Adjustment in Industry Deflators Strengthens Estimated Innovation–Productivity Relationships
How do investments in innovation translate into future productivity growth? Empirically answering this question is challenging. R&D spending is an observed input into the innovation process, but mapping it to productivity growth requires assumptions about the depreciation of R&D capital, gestation lags, and how well such expenditures capture true innovative effort (Hall, 2007). Patents, an alternative measure, capture successful innovations but vary widely in novelty (Kelly et al., 2021) and economic value (Kogan et al., 2017). Firms may forgo patenting to preserve secrecy, while others ...
Working Paper
The Geography of Job Tasks
The returns to skills and the nature of work differ systematically across labor markets of different sizes. Prior research has pointed to worker interactions, technological innovation, and specialization as key sources of urban productivity gains, but has been limited by the available data in its ability to fully characterize work across geographies. We study the sources of geographic inequality and present new facts about the geography of work using online job ads. We show that the (i) intensity of interactive and analytic tasks, (ii) technological requirements, and (iii) task specialization ...
Working Paper
Why Is Manufacturing Productivity Growth So Low?
We examine the recent slow growth in manufacturing productivity. We show that nearly all measured TFP growth since 1987 — and its post-2000s decline — comes from a few computer-related industries. We argue conventional measures understate manufacturing productivity growth by failing to fully capture quality improvements. We compare consumer to producer and import price indices. In rapidly changing industries, consumer price indices indicate less inflation, suggesting mismeasurement in standard industry deflators. Using an input-output framework, we estimate that TFP growth is understated ...
Working Paper
A Twenty-First Century of Solitude? Time Alone and Together in the United States
This paper explores trends in time alone and with others in the United States. Since 2003, Americans have increasingly spent their free time alone, on leisure at home, and have decreasingly spent their free time with individuals from other households. These trends are more pronounced for non-White individuals, for males, for the less educated, and for individuals from lower-income households. Survey respondents spending a large fraction of their free time alone report lower subjective well-being. As a result, differential trends in time alone suggest that between-group inequality may be ...