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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
Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity in the United States during and after the Great Recession
Rigidity in wages has long been thought to impede the functioning of labor markets. In this paper, we investigate the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in US labor markets using job-level data from a nationally representative establishment-based compensation survey collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We use several distinct methods to test for downward nominal wage rigidity and to assess whether such rigidity is less or more severe in the presence of negative economic shocks than in more normal economic times. We find a significant amount of downward nominal wage rigidity in ...
Working Paper
Job-hopping in Silicon Valley: some evidence concerning the micro-foundations of a high technology cluster
In Silicon Valley's computer cluster, skilled employees are reported to move rapidly between competing firms. If true, this job-hopping facilitates the reallocation of resources towards firms with superior innovations, but it also creates human capital externalities that reduce incentives to invest in new knowledge. Outside of California, employers can use non-compete agreements to reduce mobility costs, but these agreements are unenforceable under California law. Until now, the claim of "hyper-mobility" of workers in Silicon has not been rigorously investigated. Using new data on labor ...
Working Paper
The Impact of the Age Distribution on Unemployment: Evidence from US States
Economists have studied the potential effects of shifts in the age distribution on the unemployment rate for more than 50 years. Most of this analysis uses a "shift-share" method, which assumes that the demographic structure has no indirect effects on age-specific unemployment rates. This paper uses state-level data to revisit the influence of the age distribution on unemployment in the United States. We examine demographic effects across the entire age distribution rather than just the youth share of the population — the focus of most previous work — and extend the date range of analysis ...
Monograph
The effect of population aging on aggregate labor supply in the United States
Output growth is determined by growth in labor productivity and growth in labor input. Over the past two decades, technological developments have changed how many economists think about growth in labor productivity. However, in the coming decades, the aging of the population will change how economists think about the growth in labor input in the United States. As the oldest baby boomers born in 1946 turned 50, then 55, and then 60, an important economic change has slowly surfaced: these people have become less likely to participate in the labor force. While this shift was obscured by a labor ...
Working Paper
Estimating the Trend Unemployment Rate in the Fourth Federal Reserve District
We estimate trend unemployment rates for Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and West Virginia, states that span parts of the Fourth District of the Federal Reserve System. Our estimated unemployment rate trend for the District as a whole stood at 5.7 percent in 2020:Q1 compared to a 4.7 percent observed unemployment rate within the District, implying a tight labor market by historical standards.
Working Paper
Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity in the United States During and After the Great Recession
Rigidity in wages has long been thought to impede the functioning of labor markets. One recent strand of the research on wage flexibility in the United States and elsewhere has focused on the possibility of downward nominal wage rigidity and what implications such rigidity might have for the macroeconomy at low levels of inflation. The Great Recession of 2008-09, during which the unemployment rate topped 10 percent and price deflation was at times seen as a distinct possibility, along with the subsequent slow recovery and persistently low inflation, has added to the relevance of this line of ...
Working Paper
Employer-to-employer flows in the U.S. labor market: the complete picture of gross worker flows
Despite the importance of employer-to-employer (EE) flows to our understanding of labor market and business cycle dynamics, the literature has lacked a comprehensive and representative measure of the size and character of these flows. To construct the first reliable measures of EE flows for the United States, this paper exploits the "dependent interviewing" techniques introduced in the Current Population Survey in 1994. The paper concludes that EE flows are large: On average 2.6 percent of employed persons change employers each month, a flow more than twice as large as that from employment ...
Discussion Paper
Assessing the Change in Labor Market Conditions
The U.S. labor market is large and multifaceted. Often-cited indicators, such as the unemployment rate or payroll employment, measure a particular dimension of labor market activity, and it is not uncommon for different indicators to send conflicting signals about labor market conditions.
Working Paper
Downward Nominal Wage Rigidity in the United States During and After the Great Recession
Rigidity in wages has long been thought to impede the functioning of labor markets. In this paper, we investigate the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity in US labor markets using job-level data from a nationally representative establishment-based compensation survey collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We use several distinct methods to test for downward nominal wage rigidity and to assess whether such rigidity is less or more severe in the presence of negative economic shocks than in more normal economic times. We find a significant amount of downward nominal wage rigidity in ...