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Working Paper
The Dotcom Bubble and Underpricing: Conjectures and Evidence
We provide conjectures for what caused the price spiral and the high underpricing of the dotcom bubble of 1999?2000. We raise two conjectures for the price spiral. First, given the uncertainty about the growth opportunities generated by the new technologies and their spillover effects across technology industries, investors saw the inflow of a large number of high-growth firms as a sign of high growth rates for the market as a whole. Second, investors interpreted the wave of highly underpriced IPOs as an opportunity to obtain gains by investing in newly public companies. The underpricing ...
Working Paper
Organizations, Skills, and Wage Inequality
We extend an on-the-job search framework in order to allow firms to hire workers with different skills and skills to interact with firms? total factor productivity (TFP). Our model implies that more productive firms are larger, pay higher wages, and hire more workers at all skill levels and proportionately more at higher skill types, matching key stylized facts. We calibrate the model using five educational attainment levels as proxies for skills and estimate nonparametrically firm-skill output from the wage distributions for different educational levels. We consider two periods in time (1985 ...
Journal Article
The 1918 Flu and COVID-19 Pandemics: Different Patients, Different Economy
Many observers seeking historical precedent for COVID-19 draw on the 1918 influenza pandemic. In this Commentary, we highlight the differences between the 1918 flu and COVID-19 pandemics in terms of the most significantly affected populations. We also show key differences in the US economy in the late 1910s and now. Not only did the 1918 influenza virus primarily affect significantly younger cohorts, but the US economy’s industry and geographic distributions were notably different at the time compared to today’s. Consequently, caution is needed when using the 1918 influenza pandemic as a ...
Working Paper
The Hedgehog’s Curse: Knowledge Specialization and Displacement Loss
This paper studies the impact of knowledge specialization on earnings losses following displacement. We develop a novel measure of the specialization of human capital, based on how concentrated the knowledge used in an occupation is. Combining our measure with individual labor histories from the NLSY 79-97 and Norway’s LEED, we show that workers with more specialized human capital suffer larger earnings losses following exogenous displacement. A one standard deviation increase in pre-displacement knowledge specialization increases the earnings losses post-displacement by 3 to 4 pp per year ...
Working Paper
Competitors' Stock Price Reaction to Mass Layoff Announcements
Using data on layoff announcements by S&P 500 firms, we show that layoff announcements mostly contain industrywide news. Competitors? stock price reactions are positively correlated with the announcer?s returns. This contagion effect is stronger for competitors whose values depend on growth opportunities. When layoff announcements induce positive stock returns to announcers, competitors with positive R&D see a 1.15% increase in their returns. Conversely, when announcements induce negative reactions to announcers, competitors with high sales growth see a reduction of 1.09% in returns. Our ...
Working Paper
Information and Inequality in the Time of a Pandemic
We introduce two types of agent heterogeneity in a calibrated epidemiological search model. First, some agents cannot afford to stay home to minimize virus exposure. Our results show that poor agents bear most of the epidemic’s health costs. Furthermore, we show that when a larger share of agents fail to change their behavior during the epidemic, a deeper recession is possible. Second, agents develop symptoms heterogeneously. We show that for diseases with a higher share of asymptomatic cases, even when less lethal, health and economic outcomes are worse. Public policies such as testing, ...
Journal Article
Revisiting Wage Growth after the Recession
In this Commentary, we show that realized wage growth since 2015 has mostly been at a rate that would be expected given observed rates of inflation and labor productivity growth. Moreover, labor productivity growth has been in line with its potential over the same period. This picture of the post-recession recovery of wages is very different from the one we observed in an earlier analysis, when all we had were data up through the end of 2015. The reasons underlying the difference are large revisions in labor productivity data and upticks in the inflation rate and labor productivity growth ...
Working Paper
Costly Information Intermediation as a Natural Monopoly
In this paper, we show that information trade has similar characteristics to a natural monopoly, where competition may be detrimental to efficiency due either to the duplication of direct costs or the slowing down of information dissemination. We present a model with two large populations in which consumers are randomly matched to providers on a period-by-period basis. Despite a moral hazard problem, cooperation can be sustained through an institution that gives incentives to information exchange. We consider different information pricing mechanisms (membership vs. buy and sell) and different ...
Journal Article
US Labor Market after COVID-19: An Interim Report
Headline numbers have shown that the US labor market has recovered the jobs lost during the pandemic. Nevertheless, there is significant variation in the recovery across states and counties and across occupations and industries. Using the available data from the monthly Current Population Survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ State and Metro Area Employment, Hours, and Earnings for January 2019 to August 2022, we present the changing patterns in the labor market. We also highlight some possible underlying reasons that are correlated with the varying patterns across groups and space. ...
Working Paper
Costly Information Intermediation as a Natural Monopoly
Many markets rely on information intermediation to sustain cooperation between large communities.We identify a key trade-off in costly information intermediation: intermediaries can create trust by incentivizing information exchange, but with too much information acquisition, intermediation becomes expensive, with a resulting high equilibrium default rate and a low fraction of agents buying this information. The particular pricing scheme and the competitive environment affect the direct and indirect costs of information transmission, represented by fees paid by consumers and the expected loss ...