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Bank:Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis  Content Type:Working Paper 

Working Paper
Expectations on Wealth Returns: Implications for Labor Supply During the Retirement Boom

We use an overlapping-generations model with incomplete markets and a frictional labor market to study how assumptions about agents’ expectations of changes in returns to wealth affect labor supply and retirement decisions. Focusing on 2020–23, when returns fluctuated sharply and retirements rose above trend, we find that when individuals internalize the dependence of returns on wealth and view changes in returns as persistent, the model generates counterfactual labor-market outcomes. Retirements fall because expectations of persistently high returns boost labor supply, outweighing wealth ...
Working Papers , Paper 2025-031

Working Paper
Drivers of Wage and Employment Growth in Recent Years: A Supply and Demand Decomposition

Understanding whether labor market developments stem from supply or demand forces has fundamental implications for the conduct of monetary policy. This article develops a structural vector autoregression (VAR) methodology to decompose U.S. employment and wage growth into supply and demand components using sign restrictions. Extending Shapiro (2026), we separately identify trend growth, current shocks, and past shocks across different industries. Results reveal that goods-producing sectors experienced strong demand-driven growth in 2022, which subsequently weakened as Federal Reserve ...
Working Papers , Paper 2026-004

Working Paper
Drivers of Wage and Employment Growth in Recent Years: A Supply and Demand Decomposition

Understanding whether labor market developments stem from supply or demand forces has fundamental implications for the conduct of monetary policy. This article develops a structural vector autoregression (VAR) methodology to decompose U.S. employment and wage growth into supply and demand components using sign restrictions. Extending Shapiro (2026), we separately identify trend growth, current shocks, and past shocks across different industries. Results reveal that goods-producing sectors experienced strong demand-driven growth in 2022, which subsequently weakened as Federal Reserve ...
Working Papers , Paper 2026-004

Working Paper
Mind the Gap: AI Adoption in Europe and the US

This paper combines international evidence from worker and firm surveys conducted in 2025 and2026 to document large gaps in AI adoption, both between the US and Europe and across European countries. Cross-country differences in worker demographics and firm composition account for an important share of these gaps. AI adoption, within and across countries, is also closely linked to firm personnel management practices and whether firms actively encourage AI use by workers. Micro-level evidence suggests that AI generates meaningful time savings for many workers. At the macro level, in recent ...
Working Papers , Paper 2026-003

Working Paper
Expanding College Access

This paper studies the effects of expanding high-quality public university capacities on student earnings and welfare. Using a quantitative model of college choice, we find that expanding the most selective colleges by 20 percent increases aggregate earnings by 0.8 percent and welfare by 2 percent. The gains arise because a large number of high-ability students are rationed out of selective colleges. When admitted, these students graduate at high rates and enjoy substantial earnings gains. The earnings gains generated by expanding college capacity are eight times larger than the fiscal cost ...
Working Papers , Paper 2026-005

Working Paper
Why Do Americans No Longer Work So Much More Than Non-Americans?

In the 1990s, Americans used to work much more than non-Americans. Nowadays, about half of the gap in hours worked has reversed. To evaluate the convergence of working hours, we develop a tractable model of labor supply enriched with multiple sources of heterogeneity across individuals, an extensive margin of participation, multi-member households, and an elaborate system of taxes and benefits upon non-employment. Using detailed measurements from micro-level and aggregate datasets, we identify model parameters and sources of heterogeneity across individuals for various countries. We run a ...
Working Papers , Paper 2026-002

Working Paper
Optimal Dynamic Tax-Transfer Policies in Heterogeneous-Agents Economies

When designing an optimal tax-transfer system, the existing literature identifies two key factors: labor efficiency and debt efficiency. The labor-efficiency approach emphasizes the trade-off between redistribution and distortion in the labor market, while the debt efficiency approach emphasizes the trade-off between monopoly rent gains and distortion in the asset market. In this paper, we propose a third factor to consider when designing optimal tax-transfer policies: the dynamic-efficiency approach. To demonstrate this, we use an analytically tractable infinite-horizon model incorporating ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-009

Working Paper
Tax Progressivity, Economic Booms, and Trickle-Up Economics

We study the macroeconomic and distributional effects of changes in income tax progressivity in the United States. We propose a method to decompose changes in the tax structure into orthogonal components measuring the level and progressivity of taxes. Estimating these components jointly with macroeconomic outcomes in a factor-augmented VAR, we find that tax level shocks are contractionary, while tax progressivity shocks are expansionary, raising output and consumption by shifting disposable income from high to low-income households. Despite being revenue neutral by construction, progressivity ...
Working Papers , Paper 2019-034

Working Paper
When Liquidity Matters: Firm Balance Sheets during Large Crises

We study how aggregate shocks shape the joint dynamics of credit spreads, debt, and liquid asset holdings for nonfinancial firms, focusing on the Great Financial Crisis(GFC) and COVID-19. Both episodes saw sharp credit spread increases and investment declines, but debt and liquidity fell during the GFC and rose during COVID-19. Crosssectionally, leverage drove spreads and investment in the GFC, while liquidity dominated during COVID-19. We build a macro-finance model of firm capital structure with a liquidity motive for working capital. Calibrated to data, it attributes the GFC to real and ...
Working Papers , Paper 2025-019

Working Paper
Private Information and Optimal Infant Industry Protection

We study infant industry protection using a dynamic model in which the industry’s cost is initially higher than that of foreign competitors. The industry can stochastically lower its cost via learning by doing. Whether the industry has transitioned to low cost is private information. Using a mechanism-design approach, we solve for the optimal protection policy that induces the industry to reveal its true cost. We show that (i) optimal protection, measured by infant industry output, declines over time and is less than that under public information and (ii) eventual viability of the infant ...
Working Papers , Paper 2022-013

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