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Working Paper
Population aging, labor demand, and the structure of wages
One consequence of demographic change is substantial shifts in the age distribution of the working-age population. As the baby boom generation ages, the usual historical pattern of a high ratio of younger workers relative to older workers has been replaced by a pattern of roughly equal percentages of workers of different ages. One might expect that the increasing relative supply of older workers would lower the wage premium paid for older, more experienced workers. This paper provides strong empirical support for this hypothesis. Econometric estimates imply that the size of one?s birth cohort ...
Working Paper
Potential effects of the Great Recession on the U.S. labor market
The effect of the Great Recession on the U.S. labor market will likely persist even after economic output has recovered. Although the recession did not greatly change the relative probabilities of job loss for different types of workers, the long-run impact will vary by worker characteristics. Workers who lost long-term jobs during the Great Recession are at increased risk of future job loss due to the loss of protection afforded by long-term job tenure, and older displaced workers are at a relatively high risk of prolonged spells of unemployment and premature retirement. The recent increase ...
Conference Paper
U. S. labor supply in the twenty-first century
The American labor force will be transformed as the twenty-first century unfolds, a change that will confront policymakers and business firms with new challenges and new opportunities. The impending slowdown of labor force growth that will accompany the retirement of the baby boom generation already is playing a central role in national debates over the future solvency of Social Security and Medicare, as well as U.S. immigration policies. But labor supply changes will be influenced by other dimensions as well. In the coming decades, American workers are likely to be, on average, older and ...
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 ...
Discussion Paper
Optimal retirement asset decumulation strategies: the impact of housing wealth
A considerable literature examines the optimal decumulation of financial wealth in retirement. We extend this line of research to incorporate housing, which comprises the majority of most households? non-pension wealth. ; We estimate the relationship between the returns on housing, stocks, and bonds, and simulate a variety of decumulation strategies incorporating reverse mortgages. We show that homeowner?s reversionary interest, the amount that can be borrowed through a reverse mortgage, is a surprisingly risky asset. Under our baseline assumptions we find that the average household would be ...
Conference Paper
Technology diffusion in U.S. manufacturing: the geographic dimension
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 ...
Journal Article
Role of firms in job creation and destruction in U.S. manufacturing
Research in recent years has documented extensively the fact that labor markets are characterized by large and pervasive flows of jobs among places of employment. However, virtually none of this research pertains to the role of the firm and its decisions in determining job creation and destruction. Previous research and data-gathering efforts have focused on employment at individual physical locations called establishments, or plants. This neglect leaves fundamental questions regarding the role of firms unanswered. Job reallocation occurring within firms may have very different causes and ...
Working Paper
Job creation, job destruction, and international competition: a literature review
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 provides an extensive review of the literature that studies the connection between international factors, such as real exchange rates and trade agreements, and the domestic labor market. Until recently, the literature has focused on the effects of international factors on net employment at aggregate levels or in selected import-competing industries. In the long run, ...
Journal Article
The evolution of regional manufacturing employment: gross job flows within and between firms and industries
The distribution of manufacturing employment across regions of the United States has changed tremendously over time. Shares of manufacturing employment in older, northern regions of the country have declined markedly relative to shares in the Sunbelt regions. But the shifting of manufacturing employment shares goes beyond the well known migration of population to the South and West. Manufacturing employment relative to population has also fallen in northern regions, and even the absolute number of manufacturing jobs has declined in these areas as well. ; Anecdotal evidence suggests that some ...