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Journal Article
Breakeven Employment Growth
Employment growth has consistently come in above pre-pandemic estimates of the rate needed for unemployment to stay near its long-run natural rate. Even so, unemployment has held steady, which raises the question of whether the “breakeven” employment growth rate has changed. In the short-run, recent surges in immigration and labor force participation have caused the current breakeven employment growth rate to rise as high as 230,000 jobs per month. However, the long-run breakeven employment growth rate appears unchanged, ranging around 70,000 to 90,000 jobs per month.
Working Paper
Is the grass really greener? Migrants' improvements in local labor market conditions and financial health
This paper documents several facts about internal migrants in the US that underlie substantial areas of economic research and policy making, but are rarely directly published. Using a large-sample, 23-year panel, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York/Equifax Consumer Credit Panel, I estimate the distribution of changes in local labor market conditions experienced by people who move to a different labor market. Net migration favors local labor markets with lower unemployment and faster job growth, but gross flows toward weaker labor markets are almost as large as the flows toward stronger labor ...
Are Continued Jobless Claims a Useful Gauge of Labor Market Conditions?
Economists have used initial claims for jobless benefits to gauge U.S. labor market conditions. Can continued claims also be used as a predictor of employment growth?
Older Workers Accounted for All Net Employment Growth in Past 20 Years
U.S. employment grew by 11.8 million from December 2000 to December 2020. That gain was due to increased employment of people age 60 and older.
Discussion Paper
Locally Owned: Do Local Business Ownership and Size Matter for Local Economic Well-being?
The concept of “economic gardening”—supporting locally owned businesses over nonlocally owned businesses and small businesses over large ones—has gained traction as a means of economic development since the 1980s. However, there is no definitive evidence for or against this prolocal business view. Therefore, I am using a rich U.S. county-level data set to obtain a statistical characterization of the relationship between local-based entrepreneurship and county economic performance for the period 2000–2009. I investigate the importance of the size of locally based businesses relative ...
Discussion Paper
Job Polarization in the United States: A Widening Gap and Shrinking Middle
Over recent decades, the U.S. workforce has undergone a dramatic restructuring in response to changes in technology, trade, and consumption patterns. Some sectors, such as health care, have expanded, while others, such as manufacturing, have contracted. These changes have altered the composition of the workforce, leading to a phenomenon often referred to as “job polarization,” an important factor contributing to economic inequality in the nation. In this post, we show that the wage gap between high- and low-paid occupations has widened over the past three decades. Further, we show that ...
Working Paper
Estimating National Weather Effects from the Ground Up
Understanding the effects of weather on macroeconomic data is critically important, but it is hampered by limited time series observations. Utilizing geographically granular panel data leverages greater observations but introduces a “missing intercept” problem: “global” (e.g., nationwide spillovers and GE) effects are absorbed by time fixed effects. Standard solutions are infeasible when the number of global regressors is large. To overcome these problems and estimate granular, global, and total weather effects, we implement a two-step approach utilizing machine learning techniques. ...
Newsletter
Small Business Employment in the Pandemic Era and Beyond
In this article, we study the creation of small firms, with a focus on the post-March 2020 period (i.e., after the start of the global Covid-19 pandemic).1 We document the increase in new small firms, as well as the contributions of small firms to employment growth, during this period. Our analysis shows that, despite the increase in the number of small businesses, the share of employees working for small firms is considerably lower than in large businesses and is, in fact, declining.
Journal Article
Higher Tariffs Might Have Created Headwinds to Employment Growth in 2025
Job growth in the United States has slowed considerably this year. We examine the effect of tariffs on job growth and argue that sectors with higher exposure to imports had greater reductions in hiring. Tariffs therefore could have reduced job growth, though there is considerable uncertainty about the effect.