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Jel Classification:J30 

Newsletter
What Does Everything Besides the Unemployment Rate Tell Us About Labor Market Tightness?

Between March 2022 and June 2023, the unemployment rate, the most commonly used gauge of labor market tightness, remained in a narrow range between 3.4% and 3.7%. Yet, over this period, nominal wage growth increased to unusually high levels and then moderated, though it remains at a historically high rate. The disparity between a relatively constant unemployment rate and large movements in nominal wage growth has led to a divide in public discourse, with some seeing low unemployment and strong wage growth as a sufficient sign of the strength of the labor market and others concerned that the ...
Chicago Fed Letter , Volume no 491 , Pages 7

Report
Gender differences in the labor market effects of the dollar

Although the dollar has been shown to influence the expected wages of workers, the analysis to date has focused on the male workforce. We show that exchange rate fluctuations also have important implications for women's wages. The dominant wage effects for women?like those for men?arise at times of job transition. Changes in the value of the dollar can cause the wage gap between women who change jobs and women who stay on in their jobs to expand or contract sharply, with the most pronounced effects occurring among the least educated women and women in highly competitive manufacturing ...
Staff Reports , Paper 121

Working Paper
Firm Dynamics and the Minimum Wage: A Putty-Clay Approach

We document two new facts about the market-level response to minimum wage hikes: firm exit and entry both rise. These results pose a puzzle: canonical models of firm dynamics predict that exit rises but that entry falls. We develop a model of firm dynamics based on putty-clay technology and show that it is consistent with the increase in both exit and entry. The putty-clay model is also consistent with the small short-run employment effects of minimum wage hikes commonly found in empirical work. However, unlike monopsony-based explanations for small short-run employment effects, the model ...
Working Paper Series , Paper WP-2013-26

Journal Article
On the Aggregate Implications of Removing Barriers to Formality

This article examines the aggregate implications of several policies aimed at removing barriers to formality. To this end, we build a dynamic equilibrium model in which heterogeneous agents choose to work for a wage or operate a technology in the formal or informal sector, based on the costs and benefits associated with these occupational choices.
Review , Volume 102 , Issue 2 , Pages 203-220

Working Paper
How Cyclical Is the User Cost of Labor?

In employment relationships, a wage is an installment payment on an implicit long-term agreement between a worker and a firm. The price of labor that impacts firm’s hiring decisions, instead, reflects the hiring wage as well as the impact of economic conditions at the time of hiring on future wages. Measured by the labor’s user cost, the price of labor is substantially more pro-cyclical than the new-hire wage or the average wage. The strong procyclicality of the price of labor calls for other forces for cyclical labor demand to explain employment fluctuations.
Working Paper Series , Paper 2024-10

Working Paper
Measuring Heterogeneity in Job Finding Rates Among the Nonemployed Using Labor Force Status Histories

We use a novel approach to studying the heterogeneity in the job finding rates of the nonemployed by classifying the nonemployed by labor force status (LFS) histories, instead of using only one-month LFS. Job finding rates differ substantially across LFS histories: they are 25-30% among those currently out of the labor force (OLF) with recent employment, 10% among those currently OLF who have been unemployed but not employed in the previous two months, and 2% among those who have been OLF in all three previous months. This heterogeneity cannot be deduced from the one-month LFS or from ...
Working Paper , Paper 14-18

Working Paper
Drivers of Wage and Employment Growth in Recent Years: A Supply and Demand Decomposition

Understanding whether labor market developments stem from supply or demand forces has fundamental implications for the conduct of monetary policy. This article develops a structural vector autoregression (VAR) methodology to decompose U.S. employment and wage growth into supply and demand components using sign restrictions. Extending Shapiro (2026), we separately identify trend growth, current shocks, and past shocks across different industries. Results reveal that goods-producing sectors experienced strong demand-driven growth in 2022, which subsequently weakened as Federal Reserve ...
Working Papers , Paper 2026-004

Working Paper
Failing Just Fine: Assessing Careers of Venture Capital-backed Entrepreneurs via a Non-Wage Measure

This paper proposes a non-pecuniary measure of career achievement: seniority. Based on a database of over 130 million resumes, this metric exploits the variation in how long it takes to attain job titles. When non-monetary factors influence career choice, assessing career attainment via non-wage measures, such as seniority, has significant advantages. Accordingly, we use our seniority measure to study labor market outcomes of VC-backed entrepreneurs. Would-be founders experience accelerated career trajectories prior to founding, significantly outperforming graduates from same-tier colleges ...
Working Papers , Paper 23-17

Working Paper
The Effect of Minimum Wages on Consumer Bankruptcy

We use cross-state differences in minimum wage (MW) levels and county-level consumer bankruptcy rates from 1991-2017 to estimate the effect of changes in minimum wages on consumer bankruptcy by exploiting policy discontinuities at state borders. We find that Chapter 7 bankruptcy rates are significantly lower in counties belonging to states with higher MW compared to neighboring counties in the lower MW state: a 10 percent increase in MW decreases the bankruptcy rate by around 4 percent. Before the 2005 bankruptcy reform, this effect was almost twice as large as for the entire sample. ...
Working Papers , Paper 22-24

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Larrimore, Jeff 10 items

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