Search Results
Working Paper
Investment and union certification
A growing body of work--both theoretical and empirical--has emphasized that unionization may be better understood as a tax on capital rather than a tax on labor. Under this "new" view, unionization unambiguously lowers investment. Using data on union certification elections, we estimate the impact of unionization on firms' investment behavior. Employing both a standard q-model and an "investment surprises" technique, we find that union certification significantly reduces investment. We find that a winning certification election has, on average, about the same effect on investment as would ...
Working Paper
The Impact of the Age Distribution on Unemployment: Evidence from US States
Economists have studied the potential effects of shifts in the age distribution on the unemployment rate for more than 50 years. Most of this analysis uses a “shift-share” method, which assumes that the demographic structure has no indirect effects on age-specific unemployment rates. This paper uses state-level data to revisit the influence of the age distribution on unemployment in the United States. We examine demographic effects across the entire age distribution rather than just the youth share of the population—the focus of most previous work—and extend the date range of analysis ...
Working Paper
Minimum wage careers?
This paper investigates the extent to which people spend careers on minimum wage jobs. We find that a small but non-trivial number of NLSY respondents spend 25%, 50%, or even 75% of the first ten years of their career on minimum or near-minimum wage jobs. Workers with these minimum wage careers tend to be drawn from groups such as women, blacks, and the less-educated that are generally overrepresented in the low-wage population. The results indicate that lifetime incomes of some workers may be supported by a minimum wage. At the same time, these same groups would be disproportionately ...
Working Paper
A cohort-based model of labor force participation
The probability that an individual participates in the labor force declines precipitously beyond age 50. This feature of labor supply suggests that ongoing shifts in the age distribution of the population will put substantial downward pressure on the aggregate labor force participation rate. However, the aggregate rate is also influenced by trends within age groups. Neglecting to model both within-group influences and shifting population shares will doom any estimate of aggregate labor supply. We develop a model that identifies birth cohorts' propensities to participate, uses these ...
Working Paper
Assessing the Change in Labor Market Conditions
This paper describes a dynamic factor model of 19 U.S. labor market indicators, covering the broad categories of unemployment and underemployment, employment, workweeks, wages, vacancies, hiring, layoffs, quits, and surveys of consumers' and businesses' perceptions. The resulting labor market conditions index (LMCI) is a useful tool for gauging the change in labor market conditions. In addition, the model provides a way to organize discussions of the signal value of different labor market indicators in situations when they might be sending diverse signals. The model takes the greatest signal ...
Working Paper
Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects
Since 2007, the labor force participation rate has fallen from about 66 percent to about 63 percent. The sources of this decline have been widely debated among academics and policymakers, with some arguing that the participation rate is depressed due to weak labor demand while others argue that the decline was inevitable due to structural forces such as the aging of the population. In this paper, we use a variety of approaches to assess reasons for the decline in participation. Although these approaches yield somewhat different estimates of the extent to which the recent decline in ...
Working Paper
Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity in the United States during and after the Great Recession
Rigidity in wages has long been thought to impede the functioning of labor markets. One recent strand of the research on wage flexibility in the United States and elsewhere has focused on the possibility of downward nominal wage rigidity and what implications such rigidity might have for the macroeconomy at low levels of inflation. The Great Recession of 2008-09, during which the unemployment rate topped 10 percent and price deflation was at times seen as a distinct possibility, along with the subsequent slow recovery and persistently low inflation, has added to the relevance of this line of ...
Working Paper
The recall and new job search of laid-off workers: a bivariate proportional hazard model with unobserved heterogeneity
Workers who lose their jobs can become re-employed either by being recalled to their previous employers or by finding new jobs. Workers' chances for recall should influence their job search strategies, so the rates of exit from unemployment by these two routes should be directly related. We solve a job search model to establish, in theory, a negative relationship between the recall and new job hazard rates. We look for evidence in the PSID by estimating a semi-parametric competing risks model with explicitly related hazards. We find only a small negative behavioral relationship between recall ...
Working Paper
Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity in the United States During and After the Great Recession
Rigidity in wages has long been thought to impede the functioning of labor markets. In this paper, we investigate the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in US labor markets using job-level data from a nationally representative establishment-based compensation survey collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We use several distinct methods to test for downward nominal wage rigidity and to assess whether such rigidity is less or more severe in the presence of negative economic shocks than in more normal economic times. We find a significant amount of downward nominal wage rigidity in ...