We construct an aggregate labor input series from 1979 to 2019 to adjust for changes in the experience and education levels of the workforce using the Current Population Survey’s Outgoing Rotation Groups. We compare the cyclical behavior of labor input to aggregate hours – finding that labor input is about 9% less volatile over the business cycle and that the quality of the workforce is countercyclical. We show that the decrease in labor productivity beginning in 2004, the “productivity slowdown,” is understated by 12 percentage points when using aggregate hours instead of labor input to calculate productivity, as compared to the 1990-2003 growth rate. Moreover, 39% of the average quarterly growth rate of labor productivity can be attributed to increases in education and experience since 2004.

The COVID-19 pandemic has killed millions across the globe and government responses have led to tens of millions of jobs lost. This paper combines the SIR epidemic model with a frictional labor market to examine the interaction between infection, wages and unemployment. The labor market is not efficient during the pandemic. Optimal policies show that it is often optimal to shut down businesses and impose a quarantine before the pandemic peaks. A quarantine itself is not enough, however, and must be complemented by additional policies. The policies are not unique and include a Pigouvian "infection tax" on those infected, a tax on susceptible individuals, higher unemployment benefits and a tax on vacancy creation. All policies are state dependent and depend both on the number of unemployed and on the number of infected.

Between 1964 and 2000, the intercounty migration rate of married couples declined by 15%. Concurrently, female labor force participation and the relative wages of women increased. In 1964, 36% of married households had both spouses in the labor force and women earned only 50% of the wages of men. Over the following 36 years, the fraction of dual earner households increased to 75% and women's earnings rose to 64% of men's. Using a two location household level search model of the labor market, we show that both the increase in dual earner households and the rise in women's wages contributed significantly to the decline in the migration rate of married households, with each explaining 55% and 16% of the decline, respectively. In addition, we show that the co-location problem has important implications for estimates of lifetime earnings inequality.

The tricky step between theory and reality, of course, is that all else is rarely equal. Inflation and above-trend growth have tended to coincide in the past. Economic growth is the enemy of low inflation, and expanding employment and income, in and of themselves, threaten the Federal Reserve’s legitimate role in protecting the purchasing power of money. Appreciating this goes a long way toward explaining why the US economy can safely buck the conventional wisdom and experience substantial noninflationary economic growth. The nominal interest rate determines the opportunity cost of holding monetary assets. The higher the interest rate, the greater is the loss from holding wealth in the form of money instead of alternative, higher-yielding nonmonetary assets. The operationalization of this presumption has traditionally come from reportedly reliable and stable relationships between changes in inflation and measures of real activity.

Is the arrival rate of a job independent of the wage that it pays? We answer this question by testing whether unemployment insurance alters the job finding rate differentially across the wage distribution. To do this, we use a Mixed Proportional Hazard Competing Risk Model in which we classify quantiles of the wage distribution as competing risks faced by searching unemployed workers. Allowing for flexible unobserved heterogeneity across spells, we find that unemployment insurance increases the likelihood that a searcher matches to higher paying jobs relative to low or medium paying jobs, rejecting the notion that wage offers and job arrival rates are independent. We show that dependence between wages and job offer arrival rates explains 9% of the increase in the duration of unemployment associated with unemployment insurance.

The quotation above expresses a common, if not dominant, view of the genesis of inflationary pressure in an economy. The story goes something like this: High GDP growth eventually places excessive strain on a nation's resources. This strain can become particularly acute in labor markets, where it is manifested as low unemployment. The labor market tightness associated with this low unemployment ultimately leads to higher prices.

The monetary transmission mechanism in New-Keynesian models is put to scrutiny. We show that, contrary to the conventional view, the transmission mechanism does not operate through the real interest rate channel. Instead, equilibrium inflation is approximately determined as in a flexible-price model; output is then pinned down by the New-Keynesian Phillips curve. The real rate only reflects the feasibility to keep consumption smooth when income changes. Contractionary monetary policy shocks reducing output and inflation are consistent with an increase, decline, or no change in the real rate. Consistency with the real rate channel is observational, not structural. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Working-age grandparents supply large amounts of child care, an observation that raises the question of how having grandchildren affects grandparents' own labor supply. Exploiting the unique genealogical design of the PSID and the random variation in the timing when the parents of first-born boys and girls become grandparents, we estimate a structural labor supply model and find a negative effect on employed grandmother's hours of work of about 30% that is concentrated near the bottom of the hours distribution, i.e., among women less attached to the labor market. Implications for the evaluation of child care and parental leave policies are discussed.

We study whether part-time work acts as a bridge towards full-time work for unemployed workers in Spain. We consider a time period when firms were encouraged to create part-time jobs by cutting employers' social security contributions. We follow the timing-of-event approach and estimate the causal effect of part-time work on the exit rate to full-time work using a multivariate duration model. We find that, after a cut in the hiring cost of part-timers, taking up a short part-time job reduced the expected time until next full-time job in the recession years. However, after an additional cut, part-time working has prolonged the expected time without a full-time job.

Can the neoclassical growth model generate fluctuations in the return to capital similar to those observed in the United States? Equating stock market returns with the return to capital, the bulk of the literature concludes that it cannot. This article makes two contributions. First is an equivalence for the neoclassical growth model between a stock market return and a return based on income and capital stock data. While the stock market return is extremely volatile, the income-based return is not. Second is the finding that the neoclassical growth model with shocks to labor productivity alone can account for the bulk of the observed volatility of the income-based return to capital (expressed relative to the volatility of income) but little of the volatility of the stock market return. Simultaneously explaining the volatility of the two measures of the return to capital within the neoclassical model will require a theory of the stock market that breaks our return-equivalence results.

From 1964-1990, the aggregate intercounty migration rate remained largely unchanged, after which it began to decrease. During this same period, however, the intercounty mi- gration rate of married couples steadily declined while the migration rate of single indi- viduals concurrently increased. These differential trends suggest important differences in how multi-member households and individuals make decisions. This paper builds on the extensive demography and labor literature by asking how much of the decline in the mo- bility of married couples can be accounted for by the rapid increase in female labor force participation from 1960 to 2000?

In this paper, we estimate and nest the canonical competitive search model of Moen (1997) inside a random search model with bargaining. The nesting,allows us to compare the two models predictions, or comparative statics, using the same empirical estimation. Furthermore, nesting provides likelihood ratio tests that demonstrate the empirical differences between competitive search and random search with bargaining. The differences between the two models include whether workers search in different "sub-markets" with different levels of productivity, they direct the search to each firm/sub-market, and the wage they receive is split efficiently via Hosios (1990). (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Over the U.S. business cycle, fluctuations in residential investment are well known to systematically lead GDP. These dynamics are documented here to be specific to the U.S. and Canada. In other developed economies residential investment is broadly coincident with GDP. Nonresidential investment has the opposite dynamics, being coincident with or lagging GDP. These observations are in sharp contrast with the properties of nearly all business cycle models with disaggregated investment. Including mortgages and interest rate dynamics aligns the theory more closely with U.S. observations. Longer time to build in housing construction makes residential investment coincident with output.

Returns on government debt bear little resemblance to returns on productive capital.

We document empirical life cycle profiles of wages, earnings, and hours of work for pay from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, following the same workers for up to four decades along the intensive margin of labor supply. For six of the eight cohorts we analyze the wage profile does not decline with age, while the earnings profile always does. The discrepancy is explained by a sharp drop of the hours profile beginning shortly after age 50, when many workers start a smooth transition into retirement by working progressively fewer hours. This pattern is not an artifact of staggered abrupt retirement, and is robust to attrition- and selection correction (i.e., to taking into account that the composition of our sample, for a given cohort, changes over time). We explore the nontrivial restrictions on dynamic models of the aggregate economy that this evidence suggests, and we provide numerical profiles that can be readily used in quantitative macroeconomic analysis.

In this paper, we estimate the canonical competitive search model of Moen (1997) and develop likelihood ratio tests to test the key equilibrium conditions that differentiates competitive search from other types. Using cross sectional data we fail to reject all of the competitive search restrictions including workers direct their search, they direct it to different “sub-markets” or firms with a particular level of productivity, and the wage they receive is efficient via Hosios (1990).

This paper studies the relationship between the availability of unsecured credit to households and unemployment. We extend the Mortensen–Pissarides model to include a goods market with search and financial frictions. Households, who have limited commitment, face endogenous borrowing constraints when financing random consumption opportunities. We show that borrowing limits depend on the sophistication of the financial system, the frequency of liquidity shocks, and the rate of return on (partially) liquid assets that households can accumulate for self insurance. Moreover, firms' expected revenue is endogenous and depends on firms' market power in the goods market and the availability of unsecured credit to consumers. As a result of the complementarity between credit and labor markets, multiple steady states might exist. Across steady states unemployment and debt limits are negatively correlated. We calibrate the model to the US labor and credit markets and illustrate the effects of an expansion in unsecured debt similar to that seen in the US from 1978 to 2008. Under the baseline calibration, the rise in unsecured credit can account for approximately seventy percent of the decline in the long-term average unemployment rate.