Search Results
Showing results 1 to 10 of approximately 35.
(refine search)
Why Human Capital Matters Why Human Capital Matters
An economist at the St. Louis Fed discusses the growing importance of human capital in determining a nation’s income.
Journal Article
Will Tech Improvements for Trading Services Switch the U.S. into a Net Exporter?
Innovations gave the U.S. a trade advantage in goods many years ago. Can innovations do the same for trade in services for the U.S.?
Journal Article
Women Affected Most by COVID-19 Disruptions in the Labor Market
Despite gains in highly skilled jobs over the years, women experienced a higher unemployment rate than men during the 2020 recession.
Journal Article
Recent trends in student loans: more loans and higher balances
Student loan borrowing accelerated during the Great Recession and now outranks any non-mortgage debt, including auto loans and credit card debt.
Journal Article
Workers Abroad Are Catching Up to U.S. Skill Levels
Although U.S. workers still command a considerable lead with respect to most countries in the world, it is remarkable how strongly other countries have been able to catch up over the past 60 years. From essentially being the sole provider of high-skill workers for both the U.S. and the world economies, U.S. workers must compete, domestically and internationally, in knowledge and skills with workers from many other countries. No matter how tough the challenges brought on by more competition become, American workers?of all education levels?can obtain productive opportunities from knowledge ...
Working Paper
Natural Resources and Global Misallocation
Are production factors allocated efficiently across countries? To differentiate misallocation from factor intensity differences, we provide a new methodology to estimate output shares of natural resources based solely on current rent flows data. With this methodology, we construct a new dataset of estimates for the output shares of natural resources for a large panel of countries. In sharp contrast with Caselli and Feyrer (2007), we find a significant and persistent degree of misallocation of physical capital. We also find a remarkable movement toward efficiency during last 35 years, ...
Labor Market Engagement and the Pandemic’s Impact on American Workers
Differing rates of employment and part-time work may help explain gender, racial and ethnic disparities in unemployment during the COVID-19 recession.
Working Paper
Markets, Externalities, and the Dynamic Gains of Openness
Inflows of foreign knowledge are the key for developing countries to catch up with the world technology frontier. In this paper, I construct a simple tractable model to analyze (a) the incentives of foreign firms to bring their know-how to a developing country and (b) the incentives of domestic firms to invest in their own know-how, given the exposure to foreign ideas and competition. The model embeds two diffusion mechanisms typically considered separately in the literature: externalities and markets. The dynamic gains of openness can be substantial under either mechanism, but their relative ...
Journal Article
What’s behind—and beyond—the default rate on student loans?
Deferment or forbearance may be masking the true student loan default rates in recent years.
Working Paper
Natural Resources and Global Misallocation
We explore the efficiency in the allocation of physical capital and human capital across countries. The observed marginal products can differ across countries because of differences in technology (i.e. production functions) and in distortions (i.e. differences in use of factors) across countries. To identify differences in technology, we use new data and propose a simple method to estimate output shares of natural resources, and thus adjust the estimated marginal products of physical and human capital. With a sample of 79 countries from 1970 to 2005, we find that the world has decidedly moved ...