Search Results
Working Paper
Firm Technology Upgrading Through Emerging Work
We construct firm-year level measures of emerging and disappearing work using ads posted between 1940 and 2000 in The Boston Globe, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Among the set of publicly listed firms, those which post ads for emerging work tend to be younger, more R&D intensive, and have higher future sales and productivity growth. Among all firms, those which post ads for emerging work are more likely to survive and, for privately held firms, are more likely to go public in the future. We develop a model —consistent with the described patterns — with incumbent job ...
Briefing
Reopening the Economy: What Are the Risks, and What Have States Done?
The process of reopening economies battered by the COVID-19 pandemic has been the subject of considerable deliberation in recent months. It is generally agreed that accurate and timely monitoring of the pace of coronavirus spread is of the utmost importance in managing reopening. In addition, the discussion of reopening has often been framed by an assess-ment of the health risks posed by each economic sector. Some sectors, for example, involve especially close and protracted interaction among customers and employees, which can facilitate COVID-19 transmission. Accordingly, the sequence ...
Working Paper
Scalable Demand and Markups
We study changes in markups across 72 product markets from 2006 to 2018. A growing literature has documented a rise in markups over time using a production function approach; we instead employ the standard microeconomic method, which is to estimate demand and then invert firms’ first-order pricing conditions to infer their markups. To make the method scalable, we propose estimating nested logit demand models, using household panel data to automate the assignment of products to nests. Our results indicate an overall upward trend in markups between 2006 and 2018, with considerable ...
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.
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 ...
Journal Article
Time Use Before, During, and After the Pandemic
Before 2020, we increasingly worked from home, spent time alone, and shared child-care duties. COVID accelerated and reshaped these trends.
Working Paper
How Wide Is the Firm Border?
We examine the within- and across-firm shipment decisions of tens of thousands of goods-producing and goods-distributing establishments. This allows us to quantify the normally unobservable forces that determine firm boundaries; that is, which transactions are mediated by ownership control, as opposed to contracts or markets. We find firm boundaries to be an economically significant barrier to trade: Having an additional vertically integrated establishment in a given destination ZIP code has the same effect on shipment volumes as a 40 percent reduction in distance. These effects are larger ...
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
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
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 ...