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Working Paper
Mortality, mass-layoffs, and career outcomes: an analysis using administrative data
Seemingly short-term labor market shocks, such as job displacements, can have persistent effects on workers? earnings, employment, job stability, consumption, and access to health insurance. A long literature suggests such changes in workers? socioeconomic conditions can have potentially important effects on health outcomes, but existing studies associating job loss to health status face several problems of measurement and identification. This paper uses a large longitudinal administrative data set of quarterly earnings and employer records matched to information on individual mortality ...
Newsletter
Labor reallocation during the Covid-19 pandemic
The Covid-19 pandemic and associated recession have had dramatically different effects across industries, with some, including large parts of the leisure and hospitality sector, truly devastated and others, like much of the manufacturing sector, able to recover quite quickly. This has led some analysts to describe the pandemic as a reallocation shock, requiring substantial movement of labor across industries. Such a process likely requires substantial time, during which the natural rate of unemployment may be elevated. In this Chicago Fed Letter, we consider two questions: First, has the need ...
Working Paper
Recent evidence on the relationship between unemployment and wage growth
The current expansion has delivered the lowest unemployment rates in decades, yet nominal wage growth has remained relatively contained. This suggests to some a shift in the historical relationship between unemployment and wage growth. We look across the states for more timely evidence of a change in this relationship. We find some evidence that the elasticity of real wage growth with respect to unemployment has fallen recently, a result that is not due to a compositional shift toward college-educated workers. However, evidence of a weakened relationship is itself weak, depending on ...
Working Paper
Earnings losses of displaced workers
Newsletter
Does the housing slump account for the slowdown in productivity growth?
The authors explore the entire construction sector, as well as the different classes of workers employed by it, to see how much it may be contributing to the recent slowdown in productivity growth.
Journal Article
Is retraining displaced workers a good investment?
Journal Article
Assessing the jobless recovery
This article reviews trends in employment growth during the recent recovery, including new evidence that much of the increase in self-employment since the beginning of the recession is likely a reflection of the weak labor market conditions of the last three years. The authors also offer thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of several explanations for the disappointing employment growth of the last few years.
Journal Article
The temporary labor force
Working Paper
Wage differentials for temporary services work: evidence from administrative data
We use administrative data from the unemployment insurance system State of Washington to study the magnitude of the wage differential associated with work in the temporary services industry. We find that temp wage rates are 15% to 20% below the levels that might have been expected based on trends during other periods in workers' careers even after controlling for differences between temps and other workers. Comparing temp wages immediately before and after temp work or to the wages on non-temp jobs begun during the same period as workers were in the temp industry yields estimates of the temp ...