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Newsletter
U.S. farm subsidies
Why should the average American care about the 2008 Farm Bill and farm subsidies? Farm subsidies can affect the price of food and can influence the amount of taxes we pay. This month's Liber8 newsletter explains why farm subsidies were originally used, spotlights the debate about their continued use, and points out some changes to the 2008 Farm Bill.
Journal Article
A primer on the empirical identification of government spending shocks
The empirical literature on the effects of government spending shocks lacks unanimity about the responses of consumption and wages. Proponents of shocks identified by structural vector auto-regressions (VARs) find results consistent with New Keynesian models: consumption and wages increase. On the other hand, proponents of the narrative approach find results consistent with neoclassical models: consumption and wages decrease. This paper reviews these two identifications and confirms their differences by using standard economic series. It also uses alternative measures of government spending, ...
Journal Article
Regional aggregation in forecasting: an application to the Federal Reserve's Eighth District
Hernndez-Murillo and Owyang (2006) showed that accounting for spatial correlations in regional data can improve forecasts of national employment. This paper considers whether the predictive advantage of disaggregate models remains when forecasting subnational data. The authors conduct horse races among several forecasting models in which the objective is to forecast regional- or state-level employment. For some models, the objective is to forecast using the sum of further disaggregated employment (i.e., forecasts of metropolitan statistical area (MSA)-level data are summed to yield ...
Newsletter
Retraining displaced U.S. workers
When the current U.S. recession ends and recovery begins, many pre-recession jobs, such as some in financial services and the automobile industry, will not return. So what are the options if jobs in your chosen industry no longer exist? The September 2009 Newsletter focuses on job retraining programs and lists some areas of projected job growth for the near future.
Journal Article
Changing trends in the labor force: a survey
The composition of the American workforce has changed dramatically over the past half century as a result of both the emergence of married women as a substantial component of the labor force and an increase in the number of minority workers. The aging of the population has contributed to this change as well. In this paper, the authors review the evidence of changing labor force participation rates, estimate the trends in labor force participation over the past 50 years, and find that aggregate participation has stabilized after a period of persistent increases. Moreover, they examine the ...
Journal Article
Keep your résumé current
Workers are switching jobs more often than in the past. Among the reasons are changes in technology, changes in demographics and changes in such institutions as unions and international trade.
Journal Article
Regional aggregation in forecasting: an application to the Federal Reserve’s Eighth District
Hernndez-Murillo and Owyang (2006) showed that accounting for spatial correlations in regional data can improve forecasts of national employment. This paper considers whether the predictive advantage of disaggregate models remains when forecasting subnational data. The authors conduct horse races among several forecasting models in which the objective is to forecast regional- or state-level employment. For some models, the objective is to forecast using the sum of further disaggregated employment (i.e., forecasts of metropolitan statistical area [MSA]-level data are summed to yield ...
Journal Article
Survey says...
Journal Article
Look who's working now
Journal Article
So much for that merit raise: the link between wages and appearance
If you've long suspected that the boss rewards not just hard work but good looks, you're right, based on research into the impact of beauty, weight and height on wages.