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

Working Paper
The Beige Book and the Business Cycle: Using Beige Book Anecdotes to Construct Recession Probabilities

The Federal Reserve releases the Beige Book prior to each Federal Open Market Committee meeting. The report is a narrative based on anecdotal and qualitative information collected from a wide range of contacts in each of the 12 Federal Reserve Districts. We take the lexicon approach to text analysis to create sentiment indexes that track changes in economic conditions from the very first Beige Book in May 1970 to the most recent (at the time of writing) in October 2024. We create additional indexes to account for various current-event shocks, such as political events or natural disasters that ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-037

Working Paper
The Heterogeneous Impacts of Job Displacement: Evidence from Canadian Job Separation Records

When estimating earnings losses upon job separations, existing strategies focus on mass-layoff separations to distinguish involuntary separations from voluntary separations. We revisit the measurement of the sources and consequences of involuntary separations using Canadian job separation records. We refine existing strategies and find that only a quarter of mass-layoff separations are indeed layoffs. Isolating mass-layoff separations that reflect involuntary displacement, we find twice the earnings losses relative to existing estimates. We also uncover significant heterogeneity in losses for ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-022

Working Paper
The Impact of Racial Segregation on College Attainment in Spatial Equilibrium

This paper seeks to understand the forces that maintain racial segregation and the Black-White gap in college attainment, as well as their interactions with place-based policy interventions. We incorporate race into an overlapping-generations spatial-equilibrium model with parental investment and neighborhood spillovers. Race matters due to: (i) a Black-White wage gap, (ii) amenity externalities—households care about their neighborhood’s racial composition—and (iii) additional barriers to moving for Black households. We find that these forces account for 71% of the racial segregation ...
Working Papers , Paper 2022-036

Working Paper
Scalable versus Productive Technologies

CORRECT ORDER OF AUTHORS: Hubmer, Chan, Ozkan, Salgado, Hong. Do larger firms have more productive technologies, are their technologies more scalable, or both? We use administrative data on Canadian and US firms to estimate a joint distribution of output elasticities of capital, labor, and intermediate inputs—thus, returns to scale (RTS)—along with total factor productivity (TFP). We find significant heterogeneity in RTS across firms within industries. Furthermore, larger firms operate technologies with higher RTS, whereas the largest firms do not exhibit the highest TFP. Higher RTS for ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-019

Working Paper
The Beige Book and the Business Cycle: Using Beige Book Anecdotes to Construct Recession Probabilities

The Federal Reserve releases the Beige Book prior to each Federal Open Market Committee meeting. The report is a narrative based on anecdotal and qualitative information collected from a wide range of contacts in each of the 12 Federal Reserve Districts. We take the lexicon approach to text analysis to create sentiment indexes that track changes in economic conditions from the very first Beige Book in May 1970 to the most recent (at the time of writing) in October 2024. We create additional indexes to account for various current-event shocks, such as political events or natural disasters that ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-037

Working Paper
The Effect of COVID Immigration Restrictions on Post-Pandemic Labor Market Tightness

During the COVID-19 pandemic, there were unprecedented shortfalls in immigration. Concurrently, as the economy recovered, the labor market became tight, with the number of vacancies per unemployed worker reaching two, more than twice its pre-pandemic average. In this article, we investigate whether these two trends are connected. We find no evidence to support the hypothesis that the immigration shortfalls caused the tight labor market, for two main reasons. First, while the immigration deficit peaked at about two million workers, this number had largely recovered by February 2022, just as ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-003

Working Paper
Scalable versus Productive Technologies

CORRECT ORDER OF AUTHORS: Hubmer, Chan, Ozkan, Salgado, Hong. Do larger firms have more productive technologies, are their technologies more scalable, or both? We use administrative data on Canadian and US firms to estimate a joint distribution of output elasticities of capital, labor, and intermediate inputs—thus, returns to scale (RTS)—along with total factor productivity (TFP). We find significant heterogeneity in RTS across firms within industries. Furthermore, larger firms operate technologies with higher RTS, whereas the largest firms do not exhibit the highest TFP. Higher RTS for ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-019

Working Paper
The Implications of Labor Market Heterogeneity on Unemployment Insurance Design

We digitize state-level and time-varying unemployment insurance (UI) laws on eligibility, payment amount, and payment duration and combine them with microdata to estimate UI eligibility, take-up, and replacement rates at the individual level. We document how income and wealth levels affect unemployment risk, eligibility, take-up, and replacement rates over the course of unemployment. We evaluate whether these findings are important for shaping UI policy design using a general-equilibrium incomplete-markets model with a frictional labor market that matches our empirical findings. We show that ...
Working Papers , Paper 2024-026

Working Paper
The Heterogeneous Impacts of Job Displacement: Evidence from Canadian Job Separation Records

When estimating earnings losses upon job separations, existing strategies focus on mass-layoff separations to distinguish involuntary separations from voluntary separations. We revisit the measurement of the sources and consequences of involuntary separations using Canadian job separation records. We refine existing strategies and find that only a quarter of mass-layoff separations are indeed layoffs. Isolating mass-layoff separations that reflect involuntary displacement, we find twice the earnings losses relative to existing estimates. We also uncover significant heterogeneity in losses for ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-022

Working Paper
The Heterogeneous Impacts of Job Displacement: Evidence from Canadian Job Separation Records

When estimating earnings losses upon job separations, existing strategies focus on mass-layoff separations to distinguish involuntary separations from voluntary separations. We revisit the measurement of the sources and consequences of involuntary separations using Canadian job separation records. We refine existing strategies and find that only a quarter of mass-layoff separations are indeed layoffs. Isolating mass-layoff separations that reflect involuntary displacement, we find twice the earnings losses relative to existing estimates. We also uncover significant heterogeneity in losses for ...
Working Papers , Paper 2023-022

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