Search Results

(refine search)

SORT BY: PREVIOUS / NEXT

All:
Title:
Author:
Abstract:
Keywords:

+ Add Search Parameter

Discussion Paper
How Have Racial and Ethnic Earnings Gaps Changed after COVID-19?
Chatterji-Len, Kasey; García, Daniel I.; Pinkovskiy, Maxim L.; Chakrabarti, Rajashri (2022-10-20)
Racial and ethnic earnings disparities have been salient features of the U.S. economy for decades. Between the pandemic-driven recession in 2020 and the rising inflation since 2021, workers’ real and nominal earnings have seen rapid change. To get a sense of how recent economic conditions have affected earnings disparities, we examine real and nominal weekly earnings trends for Asian, Black, Hispanic, and white workers. We find that average real weekly earnings have been declining in the past year, but less so for Black and Hispanic workers than for white and Asian workers. Black and ...
Liberty Street Economics , Paper 20221020a

Report
An Approach to Predicting Regional Labor Market Effects of Economic Shocks: The COVID-19 Pandemic in New England
Jackson, Osborne (2020-06-29)
The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic led state and local governments throughout New England and much of the nation to issue ordinances restricting activity that might otherwise contribute to the spread of the disease. Individuals also freely adjusted their behavior, hoping to reduce the chances of infecting themselves or others. As a result, many employers have experienced substantial reductions in sales revenue, which were expected to generate harmful effects on the labor market. Even though the reversal of mandated policies and voluntary behavior changes are well under way, the initial ...
Current Policy Perspectives

Working Paper
The Dynamics of the Smoking Wage Penalty
Darden, Michael; Pitts, M. Melinda; Hotchkiss, Julie L. (2020-07-28)
Cigarette smokers earn significantly less than nonsmokers, but the magnitude of the smoking wage gap and the pathways by which it originates are unclear. Proposed mechanisms often focus on spot differences in employee productivity or employer preferences, neglecting the dynamic nature of human capital development and addiction. In this paper, we formulate a dynamic model of young workers as they transition from schooling to the labor market, a period in which the lifetime trajectory of wages is being developed. We estimate the model with data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2020-11

Discussion Paper
How Do Firms Respond to Hiring Difficulties? Evidence from the Federal Reserve Banks' Small Business Credit Survey
de Zeeuw, Mels; Terry, Ellie (2018-08-21)
Using data from the Federal Reserve Banks' 2017 Small Business Credit Survey (SBCS), this paper investigates the various ways in which different types of firms with less than 500 employees experience and address hiring difficulties, including when they decide to increase compensation. {{p}} The authors find significant variation in hiring difficulties by type of firm, and a firm's response appears to depend on the nature of the problem. The most common response is to increase compensation, with firms that experience competition from other employers being the most likely to do so. Other common ...
FRB Atlanta Community and Economic Development Discussion Paper , Paper 2018-1

Working Paper
Dissecting Idiosyncratic Earnings Risk
Halvorsen, Elin; Holter, Hans; Ozkan, Serdar; Storesletten, Kjetil (2022-09-16)
This paper examines whether nonlinear and non-Gaussian features of earnings dynamics are caused by hours or hourly wages. Our findings from the Norwegian administrative and survey data are as follows: (i) Nonlinear mean reversion in earnings is driven by the dynamics of hours worked rather than wages since wage dynamics are close to linear, while hours dynamics are nonlinear—negative changes to hours are transitory, while positive changes are persistent. (ii) Large earnings changes are driven equally by hours and wages, whereas small changes are associated mainly with wage shocks. (iii) ...
Working Papers , Paper 2022-024

Working Paper
Estimating Occupation- and Location-Specific Wages over the Life Cycle
Terry, Ellyn; Ilin, Elias (2021-06-03)
In this paper we develop a novel method to project location-specific life-cycle wages for all occupations listed in the Occupational Outlook Handbook from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Our method consists of two steps. In the first step, we use individual-level data from the Current Population Survey to estimate the average number of years of potential labor market experience that is associated with each percentile of the education-level specific wage distribution. In the second step, we map this estimated average years of experience to the wage-level percentiles reported in the ...
FRB Atlanta Working Paper , Paper 2021-15a

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

Report
Unemployment Benefits and Unemployment in the Great Recession: The Role of Equilibrium Effects
Mitman, Kurt; Karahan, Fatih; Manovskii, Iourii; Hagedorn, Marcus (2013-10-01)
Equilibrium labor market theory suggests that unemployment benefit extensions affect unemployment by impacting both job search decisions by the unemployed and job creation decisions by employers. The existing empirical literature focused on the former effect only. We develop a new methodology necessary to incorporate the measurement of the latter effect. Implementing this methodology in the data, we find that benefit extensions raise equilibrium wages and lead to a sharp contraction in vacancy creation and employment and a rise in unemployment.
Staff Reports , Paper 646

Journal Article
Lifetime Earnings Differences across Black and White Individuals: Years Worked Matter
Glover, Andrew; Mustre-del-Rio, Jose; Pollard, Emily (2022-12-01)
In this article, Andrew Glover, José Mustre-del-Río, and Emily Pollard go beyond point-in-time measures of earnings and examine lifetime earnings differences between Black and white individuals. They find that, on average, Black individuals earn about one-third less than white individuals over the course of their lifetimes (a difference equivalent to about $550,000), though the size of this gap varies by sex and education level. In addition, they find that differences in years worked, which are not captured by point-in-time measures, contribute substantially to earnings differences between ...
Economic Review , Volume 108 , Issue no.1

Briefing
Career Progressions and Wage Growth: Is There a One-Size-Fits-All Job Ladder?
Borovickova, Katrina; Macaluso, Claudia (2024-05)
Differences in earnings across workers are large and become larger as workers age. In this article, we explore the contribution of different career dynamics to the earnings gap between poorer and richer workers. We emphasize how poorer workers do not lack opportunities to change jobs, as they have high job mobility rates. Thus, they potentially could work at increasingly better-paying firms but seldom do so in practice. Indeed, despite many job changes, wages and employer quality are stagnant over the life cycle for poorer workers. We discuss this finding in light of previous economic ...
Richmond Fed Economic Brief , Volume 24 , Issue 14

show more (2)

show more (51)

PREVIOUS / NEXT

Fed in Print

Search Results

FILTER BY year

FILTER BY Bank

FILTER BY Series

FILTER BY Content Type

FILTER BY Author

FILTER BY Jel Classification