Search Results
Conference Paper
The impact of demographic change on U. S. labor markets
According to the U. S. Census Bureau projections, the United States will face dramatic demographic changes over the next one hundred years. Indeed, the country will be entering largely uncharted territory. In the twenty-first century, the population is expected to grow more slowly than ever before over an extended period. The population will also age rapidly, with the share of the population over 65 climbing to a succession of new record highs. Finally, the United States will once again become a nation of immigrants. Over the past decade, the wave of new immigrants has already neared ...
Report
Living beyond our means
Both the current account deficit and the federal fiscal deficit are symptoms of living beyond our means. In this essay, we first provide the basic conceptual background, starting with some elements of national income accounting. We show how the two deficits are related to each other, and how they may be affected by public policy and private actions that impact economic behavior. We then cover the facts about the two deficits--their magnitude and their recent history. Next comes the question of sustainability and the long term consequences of the deficits. We conclude with an overview of the ...
Monograph
Labor supply in the new century
To explore the labor-supply trends that will affect economic policymaking in the twenty-first century, the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston chose "Labor Supply in the New Century? as the theme for its 52nd Annual Economic Conference held in June 2007. The conference?s six papers and its keynote address by Eugene Steuerle provide a broad overview of the quantity and quality implications of labor-supply trends.
Discussion Paper
A new approach to raising Social Security’s earliest eligibility age
While Social Security?s Normal Retirement Age (NRA) is increasing to 67, the Earliest Eligibility Age (EEA) remains at 62. Similar plans to increase the EEA raise concerns that they would create excessive hardship on workers who are worn-out or in bad health. One simple rule to increase the EEA is to tie an increase to the number of quarters of covered earnings. Such a provision would allow those with long work lives?presumably the less educated and lower paid?to quit earlier. We provide evidence that this simple rule would not satisfy the goal of preventing undue hardship on certain workers. ...
Working Paper
Gross job flows and firms
This paper extends the work of Dunne, Roberts, and Samuelson [3] and Davis, Haltiwanger, and Schuh [2] on gross job flows among manufacturing plants. Gross job creation, destruction, and reallocation have been shown to be important in understanding the birth, growth, and death of plants, and the relation of plant life cycles to the business cycle. However, little is known about job flows between firms or how job flows among plants occur within firms (corporate restructuring). We use information on company organization from the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD) to investigate the ...
Working Paper
Job creation, job destruction, and international competition: job flows and trade: the case of NAFTA
This paper is a chapter in our forthcoming monograph, Job Creation, Job Destruction, and International Competition (W.E. Upjohn Institute 2003), and expands on the ideas advanced in Klein, Schuh, and Triest (2003). The chapter is a case study of the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on the U.S. labor market in three industries: textiles and apparel, chemicals, and automobiles. NAFTA significantly altered the trade environment for these industries and contributed to changes in the bilateral export-import structure among the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Our ...
Conference Paper
Job reallocation and the business cycle: new facts for an old debate
Discussion Paper
TIPS scorecard: are TIPS accomplishing what they were supposed to accomplish?: can they be improved?
In September 1997, the U.S. Treasury developed the TIPS market in order to achieve three important policy objectives: (1) to provide consumers with a class of assets that allows for hedging against real interest rate risk, (2) to provide holders of nominal contracts a means of hedging against inflation risk, and (3) to provide everyone with a reliable indicator of the term structure of expected inflation. This paper evaluates progress toward the achievement of these objectives and analyzes prospective ways to better meet these objectives in the future, by, for example, extending the maturity ...
Working Paper
Job creation, job destruction, and the real exchange rate
This paper contributes to an understanding of internationally generated adjustment costs by demonstrating a statistically significant and economically relevant effect of the real exchange rate on job creation and job destruction in U.S. manufacturing industries over the period 1973 to 1993. The responsiveness of these gross job flows to the real exchange rate reflects pervasive heterogeneity with respect to international conditions across firms, even within narrowly defined industries. We document this heterogeneity and show that the responsiveness of job flows to movements in the real ...