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Working Paper
Granular Income Inequality and Mobility using IDDA: Exploring Patterns across Race and Ethnicity
We explore the evolution of income inequality and mobility in the U.S. for a large number of subnational groups defined by race and ethnicity, using granular statistics describing income distributions, income mobility, and conditional income growth derived from the universe of tax filers and W-2 recipients that we observe over a two-decade period (1998–2019). We find that income inequality and income growth patterns identified from administrative tax records differ in important ways from those that one might identify in public survey sources. The full set of statistics that we construct is ...
Journal Article
Do Group Unemployment Rates Send Warning Signs about the Broader Labor Market?
Labor market commentary often discusses unemployment rates for certain groups as potential leading indicators for the overall unemployment rate. I test that idea for several commonly mentioned groups, finding that increases in the unemployment rates for Black workers and workers who did not complete high school do predict higher overall unemployment in subsequent months. Though not commonly discussed in this context, increases in the unemployment rate for workers aged 35–44 also predict higher subsequent overall unemployment.
Working Paper
Unemployment Insurance Generosity and Wage Determination
Using public-use data from the Current Population Survey, we estimate the effects of changes in unemployment insurance (UI) generosity on the wages of new hires from unemployment, job changers, and continuously employed workers. We find similar, modestly positive elasticities across all groups of workers. Posted wages respond similarly on average, but differences in distributional effects suggest that changes in wage posting are unlikely to fully explain the effects on realized wages. More generous UI also reduces hiring from unemployment and job-to-job transitions, reduces labor force exit, ...
Working Paper
Re-examining Regional Income Convergence: A Distributional Approach
We re-examine recent trends in regional income convergence, considering the full distribution of income rather than focusing on the mean. Measuring similarity by comparing each percentile of state distributions to the corresponding percentile of the national distribution, we find that state incomes have become less similar (i.e. they have diverged) within the top 20 percent of the income distribution since 1969. The top percentile alone accounts for more than half of aggregate divergence across states over this period by our measure, and the top five percentiles combine to account for 93 ...
Working Paper
A Shock by Any Other Name? Reconsidering the Impacts of Local Demand Shocks
Over the last decade, research on labor market adjustment following local demand shocks has expanded to explore a wide variety of measured shocks. However, the worker adjustments observed in response to these shocks are not always consistent across studies. We create a harmonized set of annual commuting-zone-level shocks following the major approaches in the literature to investigate these differences. As one might expect, shocks of different types exhibit different geographic and temporal patterns and are generally weakly correlated with each other. We find they also generate different ...