Search Results
Journal Article
Where Are the Workers? A Look into the Decline in Immigration
The number of missing workers in the US labor force peaked at 2.58 million in June 2020 during the pandemic, but immigration restrictions are likely not the main driver of the high vacancy-to-unemployment ratio.
Journal Article
Where Are Labor Markets the Tightest? A Tale of the 100 Largest US Cities
How does labor market tightness vary across the US, and how have labor markets changed since the pandemic? The vacancy-to-unemployment ratio is a common measure.
Journal Article
Drivers of Wage and Employment Growth in Recent Years: A Supply and Demand Decomposition
Understanding whether labor market developments stem from supply or demand forces has fundamental implications for the conduct of monetary policy. This article develops a structural vector autoregression (VAR) methodology to decompose U.S. employment and wage growth into supply and demand components using sign restrictions. Extending Shapiro 2026, we separately identify trend growth, current shocks, and past shocks across different industries. Results reveal that goods-producing sectors experienced strong demand-driven growth in 2022, which subsequently weakened as Federal Reserve tightening ...
Journal Article
Nominal Wage Adjustments during High Inflation and Tight Labor Markets
The U.S. economic recovery after COVID has been characterized by relatively high inflation and low unemployment. At the same time, average wages increased at a rapid pace during this period, faster than in previous years. Grigsby, Hurst, and Yildirmaz (2021) study nominal wage rigidity in the United States and document that before the pandemic, wage declines were rare and over 35 percent of workers would not receive a wage increase year over year. Given the larger-than-usual aggregate wage growth in the aftermath of the pandemic, we revisit these results and study the frequency and the ...
Journal Article
The Effect of COVID-19 Immigration Restrictions on Post-Pandemic Labor Market Tightness
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were unprecedented shortfalls in immigration. Concurrently, as the economy recovered, the labor market became tight, with the number of vacancies per unemployed worker reaching two, more than twice its pre-pandemic average. In this article, we investigate whether these two trends are connected. We find no evidence to support the hypothesis that the immigration shortfalls caused the tight labor market, for two main reasons. First, while the immigration deficit peaked at about two million workers, this number had largely recovered by February 2022, just as ...
Working Paper
Drivers of Wage and Employment Growth in Recent Years: A Supply and Demand Decomposition
Understanding whether labor market developments stem from supply or demand forces has fundamental implications for the conduct of monetary policy. This article develops a structural vector autoregression (VAR) methodology to decompose U.S. employment and wage growth into supply and demand components using sign restrictions. Extending Shapiro (2026), we separately identify trend growth, current shocks, and past shocks across different industries. Results reveal that goods-producing sectors experienced strong demand-driven growth in 2022, which subsequently weakened as Federal Reserve ...
Working Paper
Drivers of Wage and Employment Growth in Recent Years: A Supply and Demand Decomposition
Understanding whether labor market developments stem from supply or demand forces has fundamental implications for the conduct of monetary policy. This article develops a structural vector autoregression (VAR) methodology to decompose U.S. employment and wage growth into supply and demand components using sign restrictions. Extending Shapiro (2026), we separately identify trend growth, current shocks, and past shocks across different industries. Results reveal that goods-producing sectors experienced strong demand-driven growth in 2022, which subsequently weakened as Federal Reserve ...
Working Paper
The Effect of COVID Immigration Restrictions on Post-Pandemic Labor Market Tightness
During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were unprecedented shortfalls in immigration. Concurrently, as the economy recovered, the labor market became tight, with the number of vacancies per unemployed worker reaching two, more than twice its pre-pandemic average. In this article, we investigate whether these two trends are connected. We find no evidence to support the hypothesis that the immigration shortfalls caused the tight labor market, for two main reasons. First, while the immigration deficit peaked at about two million workers, this number had largely recovered by February 2022, just as ...
Working Paper
Where Did the Workers Go? The Effect of COVID Immigration Restrictions on Post-Pandemic Labor Market Tightness
During the COVID pandemic there were unprecedented shortfalls in immigration. At the same time, during the economic recovery, the labor market was tight, with the number of vacancies per unemployed worker reaching 2.5, more than twice its pre-pandemic average. In this paper, we investigate whether these two trends are linked. We do not find evidence to support the hypothesis that the immigration shortfalls caused the tight labor market for two reasons. First, at the peak, we were missing about 2 million immigrant workers, but this number had largely recovered by February 2022 just as the ...
What Have We Learned from the U.S. Tariff Increases of 2018-19?
An analysis of the 2018-19 tariff hikes on Chinese imports suggests they affected import patterns and prices of the kind of goods subject to the duties.