Search Results
Journal Article
Why Are Workers Staying Out of the U.S. Labor Force?
Shifts in retirement and people taking care of family or the home appear to be behind the drop in labor market participation.
Are Higher Child Care Wages Affecting the Labor Supply?
An analysis suggests that a rebound in labor force participation among women with a partner and child could have been stronger during the pandemic if not dampened by child care costs.
Residential Segregation and the Black-White College Gap
Using an economic model, researchers find that racial wage disparities, the amenity externality and racial barriers to moving could help explain the Black-white gap in college attainment.
Journal Article
Pandemic Recession: L- or V-Shaped?
We develop and calibrate a search-theoretic model of the labor market in order to forecast the evolution of the aggregate US labor market during and after the coronavirus pandemic. The model is designed to capture the heterogeneity of the transitions of individual workers across states of unemployment and employment and across different employers. The model is designed also to capture the trade-offs in the choice between temporary and permanent layoffs. Under reasonable parametrizations of the model, the lockdown instituted to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus is shown to have ...
Labor Force Exits and COVID-19: Who Left, and Are They Coming Back?
Millions of workers are still unemployed or have dropped out of the labor force. What is the likelihood that these people will return to work in the coming year?
Examining Recent Patterns in Residential Building Permits
Where are America’s homes being built? This analysis looks at 2023 housing permits per capita in the country’s metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas.
Assets and Debt across Generations
This analysis examines the household wealth that baby boomers, Gen Xers and millennials each held at age 30, comparing these generations’ assets, debt and net worth.
Journal Article
Labor Force Exiters around Recessions: Who Are They?
This article identifies workers who experienced a job separation during the Great Recession or the pandemic recession and tracks their labor force status in the following year, using the Current Population Survey. Workers are classified as exiters if they leave the labor force shortly after their job loss and non-exiters if they do not. The pool of exiters is disproportionately female, less educated, and older. During the pandemic recession, there were even more older workers in the exiters pool, although they were less likely to report being retired compared with in the Great Recession. In ...
Working Paper
Real Wage Growth at the Micro Level
This paper investigates patterns in real wage growth in 2022 to determine whether wages have kept up with rising price levels, and how this differs among labor market participants. Using the CPS for wages and imputing expenditure data from the CEX, we measure separately nominal wage growth and inflation rates at the micro level. We find that there is more heterogeneity in the former, meaning that when we combine them, an individual’s real wage growth is primarily driven by their nominal wage growth. In 2022, 57% of individuals experienced negative real wage growth, with older and less ...
Working Paper
Time Averaging Meets Labor Supplies of Heckman, Lochner, and Taber
We add endogenous career lengths to the Heckman, Lochner, and Taber (1998a) (HLT) model with its credit markets and within-period labor supply indivisibilities, all of which are essential features of Ljungqvist and Sargent (2006) “time-averaging.” A benchmark social security system puts all workers at corner solutions of their retirement decisions. That lets our model reproduce most outcomes in HLT’s model with its inelastic labor supply and mandatory retirement date for all types of workers. Eight types of workers are indexed by pairs of innate abilities and choices of education ...