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Working Paper
Consumption and Hours in the United States and Europe
Fang, Lei; Yang, Fang (2022-09-08)
We document large differences between the United States and Europe in allocations of expenditures and time for both market and home activities. Using a life-cycle model with home production and endogenous retirement, we find that the cross-country differences in consumption tax, social security system, income tax and TFP together can account for 68-95 percent of the cross-country variations and more than half of the average differences between Europe and the United States in aggregate hours and expenditures. These factors can also account well for the cross-country differences in allocations ...
Working Papers , Paper 2216

Working Paper
The Cross-Section of Labor Leverage and Equity Returns
Donangelo, Andres; Gourio, François; Kehrig, Matthias; Palacios, Miguel (2017-09-04)
Using a standard production model, we demonstrate theoretically that, even if labor is fully flexible, it generates a form of operating leverage if (a) wages are smoother than productivity and (b) the capital-labor elasticity of substitution is strictly less than one. Our model supports using labor share?the ratio of labor expenses to value added?as a proxy for labor leverage. We show evidence for conditions (a) and (b), and we demonstrate the economic significance of labor leverage: High labor-share firms have operating profits that are more sensitive to shocks, and they have higher expected ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2017-22

Working Paper
Dissecting the Great Retirement Boom
Birinci, Serdar; Faria-e-Castro, Miguel; See, Kurt (2024-07)
Between 2020 and 2023, the fraction of retirees in the working-age population in the U.S. increased above its pre-pandemic trend. Several explanations have been proposed to rationalize this gap, such as the rise in net worth due to higher asset returns, the labor market's deterioration due to higher unemployment risk, the expansion of fiscal support programs, and increased mortality risk. We quantitatively study the interaction of these factors and decompose their relative contribution to the recent rise in retirements using an incomplete markets, overlapping generations model with a ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-017

Working Paper
Lifetime Work Hours and the Evolution of the Gender Wage Gap
Leukhina, Oksana; Vandenbroucke, Guillaume (2024-09-30)
The gender wage gap expanded from 1940 and 1975 but narrowed sharply from 1980 to 1995. We use the model introduced in Ben-Porath (1967) to assess the role of gender differences in life cycle profiles of market time in explaining the gender wage gap dynamics over the long run. Men’s profiles changed little across cohorts, but women’s profiles converged to those of men, and especially so in higher-paying occupations. We calibrate the model and find that the implied trends in unobserved investment in human capital accumulation account for most of the long run gender wage gap dynamics. The ...
Working Papers , Paper 2022-025

Working Paper
Informal Work and Official Employment Statistics: What’s Missing?
Bracha, Anat; Burke, Mary A. (2023-09-01)
Using eight consecutive waves of the Survey of Informal Work Participation (SIWP) spanning 2015 through 2022, we investigate informal “gig” work participation in the United States— broadly defined to include online and offline activities—and its implications for the measurement of employment. Our results suggest that employment rates among US household heads were consistently understated in the Current Population Survey (CPS). Under conservative estimates, we find that the employment-to-population ratio would have been 0.25 to 1.1 percentage points higher over the 2015–2022 period ...
Working Papers , Paper 23-15

Working Paper
Hours Worked and Lifetime Earnings Inequality
Bick, Alexander; Blandin, Adam; Rogerson, Richard (2025-04-06)
We document large differences in lifetime hours of work using data from the NLSY79 and argue that these differences are an important source of inequality in lifetime earnings. To establish this we develop and calibrate a rich heterogeneous agent model of labor supply and human capital accumulation that allows for heterogeneity in preferences for work, initial human capital and learning ability, as well as idiosyncratic shocks to human capital throughout the life-cycle. Our calibrated model implies that almost 20 percent of the variance in lifetime earnings is accounted for by differences in ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-024

Working Paper
Work from Home After the COVID-19 Outbreak
Mertens, Karel; Bick, Alexander; Blandin, Adam (2020-07-17)
Based on rich novel survey data, we document that 35.2 percent of the US workforce worked entirely from home in May 2020, up from 8.2 percent in February. Highly educated, high-income and white workers were more likely to shift to working from home and maintain employment following the pandemic. Individuals working from home daily before the pandemic lost employment at similar rates as daily commuters. This suggests that, apart from the potential for home-based work, demand conditions also mattered for job losses. We find that 71.7 percent of workers that could work from home effectively did ...
Working Papers , Paper 2017

Working Paper
Does Access to Free Pre-Kindergarten Increase Maternal Labor Supply?
Ilin, Elias; Shampine, Samantha; Terry, Ellyn (2022-02-02)
In this paper, we evaluate the effects of free pre-kindergarten (pre-K) programs on the labor force participation (LFP) of mothers. We use variation in pre-K rules across all US states, including income eligibility requirements in some states. To estimate the causal effects of access to pre-K on labor supply, we exploit the panel aspect of the monthly Current Population Survey between 2002 and 2019. Specifically, we look at the change in labor market behavior of women when their child becomes age-eligible for pre-K, controlling for individual factors. We find that access to free pre-K ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2022-3

Journal Article
The rise and fall of labor force participation in the United States
Bullard, James B. (2014)
Monetary policy choices going forward are explicitly tied to labor market performance. Hence, the sharp decline in the labor force participation rate following the 2007-09 recession has become a salient topic.
Review , Volume 96 , Issue 1 , Pages 1-12

Working Paper
Allocating Effort and Talent in Professional Labor Markets
Barlevy, Gadi; Neal, Derek (2016-03-04)
In many professional service firms, new associates work long hours while competing in up-or-out promotion contests. Our model explores why these firms require young professionals to take on heavy work loads while simultaneously facing significant risks of dismissal. We argue that the productivity of skilled partners in professional service firms (e.g. law, consulting, investment banking and public accounting) is quite large relative to the productivity of their peers who are competent and experienced but not well-suited to the partner role. Therefore, these firms adopt personnel policies that ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2016-3

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