Search Results
Working Paper
Job-to-Job Mobility and Inflation
The low rate of inflation observed in the U.S. over the past decade is hard to reconcile with traditional measures of labor market slack. We develop a theory-based indicator of interfirm wage competition that can explain the missing inflation. Key to this result is a drop in the rate of on-the-job search, which lowers the intensity of interfirm wage competition to retain or hire workers. We estimate the on-the-job search rate from aggregate labor-market flows and show that its recent drop is corroborated by survey data. During "the great resignation", the indicator of interfirm wage ...
Working Paper
Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects
Since 2007, the labor force participation rate has fallen from about 66 percent to about 63 percent. The sources of this decline have been widely debated among academics and policymakers, with some arguing that the participation rate is depressed due to weak labor demand while others argue that the decline was inevitable due to structural forces such as the aging of the population. In this paper, we use a variety of approaches to assess reasons for the decline in participation. Although these approaches yield somewhat different estimates of the extent to which the recent decline in ...
Working Paper
Labor Force Participation: Recent Developments and Future Prospects
Since 2007, the labor force participation rate has fallen from about 66 percent to about 63 percent. The sources of this decline have been widely debated among academics and policymakers, with some arguing that the participation rate is depressed due to weak labor demand while others argue that the decline was inevitable due to structural forces such as the aging of the population. In this paper, we use a variety of approaches to assess reasons for the decline in participation. Although these approaches yield somewhat different estimates of the extent to which the recent decline in ...
Working Paper
Bad Jobs and Low Inflation
We study a model in which firms compete to retain and attract workers searching on the job. A drop in the rate of on-the-job search makes such wage competition less likely, reducing expected labor costs and lowering inflation. This model explains why inflation has remained subdued over the last decade, which is a conundrum for general equilibrium models and Phillips curves. Key to this success is the observed slowdown in the recovery of the employment-to-employment transition rate in the last five years, which is interpreted by the model as a decline in the share of employed workers searching ...
Working Paper
Bad Jobs and Low Inflation
The low rate of inflation observed in the U.S. over the entire past decade is hard to reconcile with traditional measures of labor market slack. We show that an alternative notion of slack that encompasses workers' propensity to search on the job explains this missing inflation. We derive this novel concept of slack from a model in which a drop in the on-the-job search rate lowers the intensity of interfirm wage competition to retain or hire workers. The on-the-job search rate can be measured directly from aggregate labor-market flows and is countercyclical. Its recent drop is corroborated by ...
Working Paper
Who counts as employed?: informal work, employment status, and labor market slack
Several recent studies find that as of 2015, a significant share of working-age adults in the United States participates in nonstandard work arrangements. Such arrangements tend to lack long-term employment contracts and are often referred to as ?gig economy? jobs. This paper investigates the implications of nonstandard or ?informal? work for the measurement of employment status and labor market slack. Using original survey data, we find that as of 2015 roughly 37 percent of nonretired U.S. adults participated in some type of informal work, and roughly 20 percent participated in informal ...
Working Paper
Bad Jobs and Low Inflation
The low rate of inflation observed in the U.S. over the entire past decade is hard to reconcile with traditional measures of labor market slack. We show that an alternative notion of slack that encompasses workers' propensity to search on the job explains this missing inflation. We derive this novel concept of slack from a model in which a drop in the on-the-job search rate lowers the intensity of interfirm wage competition to retain or hire workers. The on-the-job search rate can be measured directly from aggregate labor-market flows and is countercyclical. Its recent drop is corroborated by ...
Journal Article
Is the American Rescue Plan Taking Us Back to the ’60s?
The American Rescue Plan provided fiscal support during a strong economic rebound, raising concerns about the risk of fueling inflation. One way to assess this risk of economic overheating uses the ratio of job vacancies to unemployment, which measures labor market slack more accurately and, hence, can predict future inflation better than the unemployment rate alone. Estimates suggest that the fiscal plan acts to temporarily raise the vacancy-to- unemployment ratio, in turn pushing up inflation by about 0.3 percentage point per year through 2022.
Journal Article
How Aggregation Matters for Measured Wage Growth
Wage growth is often measured by the change in average hourly earnings (AHE), a gauge of overall wages that aggregates information on earnings and hours worked across individuals. A close look at this aggregation method demonstrates that AHE growth reflects disproportionately the profile of high-earning workers who typically display lower and less cyclically sensitive wage growth. Using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we adopt a different aggregation method and compute wage growth as the average of individuals’ wage growth. The analysis indicates that the CPS measure of ...
Report
Wage inflation and informal work
Despite very low unemployment in the United States in recent months, wage inflation has remained modest. This paper investigates the possibility that there is hidden labor market slack in the form of informal or gig economy work, which may help explain this wage growth puzzle. Using unique data from 2015 and 2016 that we collected through the Survey of Informal Work Participation ? part of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York?s Survey of Consumer Expectations ? we find indirect and direct evidence for this hypothesis. First, we find that a measure of informal labor is negatively associated ...