Search Results
Working Paper
Technological adaptation, cities and new work
Where does adaptation to innovation take place? The author presents evidence on the role of agglomeration economies in the application of new knowledge to production. All else equal, workers are more likely to be observed in new work in locations that are initially dense in both college graduates and industry variety. This pattern is consistent with economies of density from the geographic concentration of factors and markets related to technological adaptation. A main contribution is to use a new measure, based on revisions to occupation classifications, to closely characterize ...
Working Paper
Fiscal Policies for Job Creation and Innovation: The Experiences of US States
This paper reviews selected fiscal policy initiatives undertaken by US states to encourage job creation and innovation. We begin with a discussion of some general considerations about the design of tax policies summarized in a tax policy design table. Four policies are reviewed: job creation tax credits, research and development tax credits, a set of tax policies targeted to the biotechnology industry, and a broad set of tax policies that attract star scientists. The experiences at the state level are used to evaluate the effectiveness of these employment and knowledge-capital tax incentives ...
Speech
An economic overview: what's next? remembering Carol Reed, Aesop's Fable, Kenneth Arrow and Thomas Dewey
Remarks before the Rotary Club of Dallas, Dallas, Texas, July 13, 2011 ; "We are being challenged as the place to invest job-creating capital. Our fiscal and regulatory authorities do not operate in a vacuum; we live in a globalized, interconnected world where money is free to go to wherever it earns the best return. In their solution to the debt crisis, our political leaders must develop an entirely new structure of incentives for private businesses and investors to put their money to work creating jobs here at home."
Journal Article
Employment Challenges for the Formerly Incarcerated
The U.S. economy is on a historic run of job creation, with 76 straight months of job growth as of June 2016. Many firms are looking for new pools of talent as traditional pools are increasingly absorbed by rising employment. Wages are beginning to rise more rapidly than they have for several years, with ADP?s Workforce Vitality Report for Q1 2016 estimating annual wage growth for full-time job holders of 4.7 percent. The strengthening labor market provides an opportunity for both employers and policymakers to reconsider the status of subgroups that face distinct barriers to the job market. ...
Journal Article
Regional variation in job creation and destruction
As companies and consumers adapt to a changing marketplace, jobs are eliminated and new ones are created. Rates at which this happens vary across states and reflect the flexibility of the labor market. More flexible markets are associated with faster growth.
Working Paper
Job matching and propagation
In the U.S. labor market, the vacancy-unemployment ratio and employment react sluggishly to productivity shocks. The authors show that the job matching model in its standard form cannot reproduce these patterns due to excessively rapid vacancy responses. Extending the model to incorporate sunk costs for vacancy creation yields highly realistic dynamics. Creation costs induce entrant firms to smooth the adjustment of new openings following a shock, leading the stock of vacancies to react sluggishly.
Working Paper
Creating jobs via the 2009 recovery act: state medicaid grants compared to broadly-directed spending
Researchers have used cross-state differences to assess the jobs impact of the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the Recovery Act). Existing studies find that the Act's broadly- directed spending (i.e. excluding tax cuts) increased employment, at a cost-per-job of roughly three to five times that of typical employment compensation in the U.S. Other research finds that a particular component of the Act -emergency Medicaid grants to states -created jobs at a cost of 12% to 20% that of broadly-directed spending. This paper shows that these dif- ferences across the components' impacts ...
Journal Article
Spotlight: Texas employment : gains aren’t simply a low-wage jobs story
Amid reports of the nation?s weak economic recovery, high unemployment and slow job growth, attention has turned to Texas, the only large state on track to surpass its prerecession peak employment by year-end. Since the U.S. recession concluded in 2009, Texas employment has grown 3.3 percent, compared with 0.6 percent for the rest of the states.[1] Texas added 827,000 jobs, an 8.7 percent increase, between 2001 and 2010 and expanded in every category except manufacturing, information and construction. The nation lost 2.8 million jobs during that period, a 2.3 percent decline.
Journal Article
Wanted: Entrepreneurs (just don't ask for a job description)
If entrepreneurship is so important, why don't we know more about it?
Journal Article
Anxious workers
In recent years, the U.S. economy has expanded at a healthy pace, employment has grown substantially, and the unemployment rate has dropped to very low levels. Despite these favorable trends, some recent news stories have emphasized worker anxiety and uncertainty about their job stability and security, reinvigorating a theme that gained substantial prominence in the mid-1990s. Research economists who have investigated this topic in general have not subscribed to the view that rising worker anxiety reflects widespread, long-term changes in labor market conditions; rather, some have argued that ...