Search Results

Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 96.

(refine search)
SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT
Jel Classification:J63 

Working Paper
Automation, Bargaining Power, and Labor Market Fluctuations

We argue that the threat of automation weakens workers' bargaining power in wage negotiations, dampening wage adjustments and amplifying unemployment fluctuations. We make this argument based on a quantitative business cycle model with labor market search frictions, generalized to incorporate automation decisions and estimated to fit U.S. time series. In the model, procyclical automation threats create real wage rigidity that amplify labor market fluctuations. We find that this automation mechanism is quantitatively important for explaining the large volatilities of unemployment and vacancies ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2019-17

Report
Replacement hiring and the productivity-wage gap

A large and growing share of hires in the United States are replacement hires. This increase coincides with a growing productivity-wage gap. We connect these trends by building a model where firms post long-lived vacancies and engage in on-the-job search for more productive workers. These features improve a firm's bargaining position while raising workers' job insecurity and the wedge between hiring and meeting rates. All three channels lower wages while raising productivity. Quantitatively, increased replacement hiring explains half the increase in the productivity-wage gap. The socially ...
Staff Reports , Paper 860

Working Paper
The Quality-Adjusted Cyclical Price of Labor

Typical measures of wages, such as average hourly earnings, fail to capture cyclicality in the effective cost of labor in the presence of (i) cyclical fluctuations in the quality of worker-firm matches, or (ii) wages being smoothed within employment matches. To address both concerns, we estimate cyclicality in labor’s user cost exploiting the longrun wage in a match to control for match quality. Using NLSY data for 1980 to 2019, we identify three channels by which hiring in a recession affects user cost: It lowers the new-hire wage; it lowers wages going forward in the match; but it also ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2023-10

Working Paper
Choosing a Control Group for Displaced Workers

The vast majority of studies on the earnings of displaced workers use a control group of continuously employed workers to examine the effects of initial displacements. This approach implies long-lived earnings reductions following displacement even if these effects are not persistent, overstating the losses relative to the true average treatment effect. This paper?s approach isolates the impact of an average displacement without imposing continuous employment on the control group. In a comparison of the standard and alternative approaches using PSID data, the estimated long-run earnings ...
Working Papers (Old Series) , Paper 1605

Working Paper
Job-to-Job Flows and the Consequences of Job Separations

A substantial empirical literature documents large and persistent average earnings losses following job displacement. Our paper extends the literature on displaced workers by providing a comprehensive picture of earnings and employment outcomes for all workers who separate. We show that for workers not recalled to their previous employer, earnings losses follow separations in general, as opposed to displacements in particular. The key predictor of earnings losses is not displacement but the length of the nonemployment spell following job separation. Moreover, displaced workers are no more ...
Working Papers , Paper 19-27

Working Paper
Income in the Off-Season: Household Adaptation to Yearly Work Interruptions

Joblessness is highly seasonal. To analyze how households adapt to seasonal joblessness, we introduce a measure of seasonal work interruptions premised on the idea that a seasonal worker will tend to exit employment around the same time each year. We show that an excess share of prime-age US workers experience recurrent separations spaced exactly 12 months apart. These separations coincide with aggregate seasonal downturns and are concentrated in seasonally volatile industries. Examining workers most prone to seasonal work interruptions, we find that these workers incur large earnings losses ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2020-084

Working Paper
Declining Dynamism, Allocative Efficiency, and the Productivity Slowdown

A large literature documents declining measures of business dynamism including high-growth young firm activity and job reallocation. A distinct literature describes a slowdown in the pace of aggregate labor productivity growth. We relate these patterns by studying changes in productivity growth from the late 1990s to the mid 2000s using firm-level data. We find that diminished allocative efficiency gains can account for the productivity slowdown in a manner that interacts with the within-firm productivity growth distribution. The evidence suggests that the decline in dynamism is reason for ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2017-019

Working Paper
Search Frictions, Labor Supply, and the Asymmetric Business Cycle

We develop a business cycle model with search frictions in the labor market and a labor supply decision along the extensive margin that yields cyclical asymmetry between peaks and troughs of the unemployment rate and symmetric fluctuations of the labor force participation rate as in the U.S. data. We calibrate the model and find that cyclical changes in the extent of search frictions are solely responsible for the peak-trough asymmetry. Participation decisions do not generate asymmetry but contribute to the fluctuations in search frictions by changing the size and composition of the pool of ...
International Finance Discussion Papers , Paper 1355

Working Paper
The Inexorable Recoveries of U.S. Unemployment

Unemployment recoveries in the US have been inexorable. Between 1949 and 2019, the annual reduction in the unemployment rate during cyclical recoveries was tightly distributed around 0.1 log points per year. The economy seems to have an irresistible force toward restoring full employment. Unless another crisis intervenes, unemployment continues to glide down to a level of approximately 3.5 percentage points. Occasionally unemployment rises rapidly during an economic crisis, while most the time, unemployment declines slowly and smoothly at a near-constant proportional rate. We show that ...
Working Paper Series , Paper 2021-20

Working Paper
Employment Dynamics in a Signaling Model with Workers' Incentives

Many firms adjust employment in a "lumpy" manner -- infrequently and in large bursts. In this paper, I show that lumpy adjustments can arise from concerns about the incentives of remaining workers. Specifically, I develop a model in which a firm's productivity depends on its workers' effort and workers' income prospects depend on the firm's profitability. I use this model to analyze the consequences of demand shocks that are observed by the firm but not by its workers, who can only try to infer the firm's profitability from its employment decisions. I show that the resulting signaling model ...
Finance and Economics Discussion Series , Paper 2017-040

FILTER BY year

FILTER BY Content Type

FILTER BY Author

Kudlyak, Marianna 15 items

Wee, Shu Lin 8 items

Bernstein, Joshua 6 items

Birinci, Serdar 6 items

Hall, Robert E. 6 items

Richter, Alexander W. 6 items

show more (130)

FILTER BY Jel Classification

E24 53 items

J64 53 items

E32 34 items

J23 13 items

J41 10 items

show more (63)

FILTER BY Keywords

Unemployment 38 items

vacancies 20 items

COVID-19 8 items

Costly Information 6 items

Inflows 6 items

Multiple Applications 6 items

show more (220)

PREVIOUS / NEXT