Research Database

We contrast the properties of dynamic Heckscher-Ohlin models with overlapping generations with those of models with infinitely lived consumers under both closed and open international capital markets. In both environments, if capital is mobile, factor price equalization occurs after the initial period. If capital is not mobile, the properties of equilibria differ drastically across environments: With infinitely lived consumers, factor prices equalize in any steady state or cycle and, in general, there is positive trade in any steady state or cycle. With overlapping generations, we construct examples with steady states and cycles in which factor prices are not equalized, and any equilibrium that converges to a steady state or a cycle with factor price equalization has no trade after a finite number of periods.

A sudden stop of capital flows into a developing country tends to be followed by a rapid switch from trade deficits to surpluses, a depreciation of the real exchange rate, and decreases in output and total factor productivity. Substantial reallocation takes place from the nontraded sector to the traded sector. We construct a multisector growth model, calibrate it to the Mexican economy, and use it to analyze Mexico's 1994–95 crisis. When subjected to a sudden stop, the model accounts for the trade balance reversal and the real exchange rate depreciation, but it cannot account for the decreases in GDP and TFP. Extending the model to include labor frictions and variable capital utilization, we still find that it cannot quantitatively account for the dynamics of output and productivity without losing the ability to account for the movements of other variables.

The goal of this paper is to extend the analysis of strategic bargaining to nonstationary environments, where preferences or opportunities may be changing over time. We are mainly interested in equilibria where trade occurs immediately, once the agents start negotiating, but the terms of trade depend on when the negotiations begin. We characterize equilibria in terms of simply dynamical systems, and compare these outcomes with the myopic Nash bargaining solution. We illustrate the practicality of the approach with an application in monetary economics.

Unable to reproduce abstract due to symbols in text. See title page for complete abstract text.

This paper considers Marshall's argument that geographic concentration of industry facilitates specialization. I use Census data on manufacturing plants to examine the relationship between localization of industry and vertical disintegration. I find that establishments located near other establishments within the same industry tend to make more intensive use of purchased inputs than establishments without own-industry neighbors. This relationship only holds among industries that are geographically concentrated; having neighbors makes no difference in geographically dispersed industries. I argue that this pattern is consistent with a model in which increased opportunity for specialization is the reason some industries localize.

This paper studies the relation between the United States’ bilateral real exchange rate and the associated bilateral relative price of nontraded goods for five of its most important trade relationships. Traditional theory attributes fluctuations in real exchange rates to changes in the relative price of nontraded goods. We find that this relation depends crucially on the choice of price series used to measure relative prices and on the choice of trade partner. The relation is stronger when we measure relative prices using producer prices rather than consumer prices. The relation is stronger the more important is the trade relationship between the United States and a trade partner. Even in cases where there is a strong relation between the real exchange rate and the relative price of nontraded goods, however, a large fraction of real exchange rate fluctuations is due to deviations from the law of one price for traded goods.

We propose a model of delegated portfolio management with career concerns. Investors hire fund managers to invest their capital either in risky bonds or in riskless assets. Some managers have superior information on the default probability. Looking at the past performance, investors update beliefs on their managers and make firing decisions. This leads to career concerns which affect investment decisions, generating a positive or negative “reputational premium.” For example, when the default probability is high, the return on the risky bond has to be high to compensate the uninformed managers for the high risk of being fired. As the default probability changes over time, the reputational premium amplifies price volatility.

We find support for a negative relation between conditional expected monthly return and conditional variance of monthly return, using a GARCH-M model modified by allowing (i) seasonal patterns in volatility, (ii) positive and negative innovations to returns having different impacts on conditional volatility, and (iii) nominal interest rates to predict conditional variance. Using the modified GARCH-M model, we also show that monthly conditional volatility may not be as persistent as was thought. Positive unanticipated returns appear to result in a downward revision of the conditional volatility whereas negative unanticipated returns result in an upward revision of conditional volatility.

This study uses data from the Panel Survey of Income Dynamics (PSID) to address a number of questions about life cycle earnings mobility. It develops a dynamic reduced form model of earnings and marital status that is nonstationary over the life cycle. The study reaches several firm conclusions about life cycle earnings mobility. Incorporating non-Gaussian shocks makes it possible to account for transitions between low and higher earnings states, a heretofore unresolved problem. The non-Gaussian distribution substantially increases the lifetime return to post-secondary education, and substantially reduces differences in lifetime wages attributable to race. In a given year, the majority of variance in earnings not accounted for by race, education and age is due to transitory shocks, but over a lifetime the majority is due to unobserved individual heterogeneity. Consequently, low earnings at early ages are strong predictors of low earnings later in life, even conditioning on observed individual characteristics.

The flow opportunity cost of moving from unemployment to employment consists of foregone public benefits and the foregone value of non-working time in units of consumption. We construct a time series of the opportunity cost of employment using detailed microdata and administrative or national accounts data to estimate benefit levels, eligibility and take-up of benefits, consumption by labor force status, hours per worker, taxes, and preference parameters. Our estimated opportunity cost is procyclical and volatile over the business cycle. The estimated cyclicality implies far less unemployment volatility in many leading models of the labor market than that observed in the data, irrespective of the level of the opportunity cost.

This study attempts to determine whether entry regulation is more restrictive in unit or branch banking states.

A model is developed in which entry, defined as the formation of a new bank or branch, is explained as being a response to the general economic climate plus regulation. Using time series data and dating the onset of effective entry regulation with the passage of the banking Act of 1935, it is ascertained that effective entry regulation has caused the aggregate rate of entry into commercial banking to fall by about sixty percent. This analysis included adjustments for changes in economic conditions. The effect of entry regulation, however, has not been uniform. Entry rates in unit banking states is estimated to be seventy percent lower than it would have been in the absence of regulation, while limited branching and statewide branching states have experienced fifty and forty percent declines, respectively.

This analysis suggests that entry in unit banking states has been more restricted than in branch banking states. Two reasons are cited that may account for this differential impact of regulation. First, regulators may tend to be more pessimistic than potential entrants regarding the profitability of a new banking office. This pessimism may not have a significant effect upon entry when other factors indicate a high probability of success, but may be important in marginal cases. Thus, because branch banking states tend to be more prevalent in the west, and because this has been the area of greatest economic growth in the past forty years, the pessimism of regulators would tend to be less apparent in branch banking areas. Second, regulators apparently prefer to issue charters for new branches rather than for new banks because they have more information on which to base their decisions. In addition, if the market demand is misjudged, a branch bank has retained earnings and other branches from which to carry short-term losses.

No abstract available.

This paper presents a simple counterexample to the belief that international policy cooperation is desirable. It also explains circumstances under which such a counterexample is possible.

Innovation and the adoption of new ideas are fundamental to economic progress. Here we examine the underlying economics of the market for ideas. From a positive perspective, we examine how such markets function with and without government intervention. From a normative perspective, we examine the pitfalls of existing institutions, and how they might be improved. We highlight recent research by ourselves and others challenging the notion that government awards of monopoly through patents and copyright are “the way” to provide appropriate incentives for innovation.

Our study examines whether there is a systematic relationship between the monetary standard under which a country operates and the rate of inflation it experiences. It also explores whether there are other properties of inflation, money, and output that differ between economies operating under a commodity standard and economies operating under a fiat standard. The basis for our study is price, money, and output data for 15 countries that have operated under both types of monetary standards. For each of these countries the data cover 80 years, and for most the data cover more than 100 years. With these data we are able to establish several facts about the differences in inflation, money growth, and output growth between economies operating under commodity standards and those operating under fiat standards. Specifically, we find that the following facts emerge when comparing commodity standards to fiat standards: inflation, money growth, and output growth are all lower; growth rates of monetary aggregates are less highly correlated with each other; growth rates of monetary aggregates are less highly correlated with inflation; and growth rates of monetary aggregates are more highly correlated with output growth.

International relative prices across industrialized countries show large and systematic deviations from relative purchasing power parity. We embed a model of imperfect competition and variable markups in a quantitative model of international trade. We find that when our model is parameterized to match salient features of the data on international trade and market structure in the US, it can reproduce deviations from relative purchasing power parity similar to those observed in the data because firms choose to price-to-market. We then examine how pricing-to-market depends on the presence of international trade costs and various features of market structure.

Employment and hours appear far more cyclical than dictated by the behavior of productivity and consumption. This puzzle has been called “the labor wedge” — a cyclical intratemporal wedge between the marginal product of labor and the marginal rate of substitution of consumption for leisure. The intratemporal wedge can be broken into a product market wedge (price markup) and a labor market wedge (wage markup). Based on the wages of employees, the literature has attributed the intratemporal wedge almost entirely to labor market distortions. Because employee wages may be smoothed versions of the true cyclical price of labor, we instead examine the self-employed and intermediate inputs, respectively. Looking at the past quarter century in the United States, we find that price markup movements are at least as important as wage markup movements — including during the Great Recession and its aftermath. Thus, sticky prices and other forms of countercyclical markups deserve a central place in business cycle research, alongside sticky wages and matching frictions.

We show that occupational licensing has significant negative effects on labor market fluidity defined as cross-occupation mobility. Using a balanced panel of workers constructed from the CPS and SIPP data, we analyze the link between occupational licensing and labor market outcomes. We find that workers with a government-issued occupational license experience churn rates significantly lower than those of non-licensed workers. Specifically, licensed workers are 24% less likely to switch occupations and 3% less likely to become unemployed in the following year. Moreover, occupational licensing represents barriers to entry for both non-employed workers and employed ones. The effect is more prominent for employed workers relative to those entering from non-employment, because the opportunity cost of acquiring a license is much higher for employed individuals. Lastly, we find that average wage growth is higher for licensed workers than non-licensed workers, whether they stay in the same occupation in the next year or switch occupations. We find significant heterogeneity in the licensing effect across different occupation groups. These results hold across various data sources, time spans, and indicators of being licensed. Overall, licensing could account for almost 8% of the total decline in monthly occupational mobility over the past two decades

We use unique price data to study how retailers react to underlying cost changes. Temporary sales account for 95% of price changes in our data. Simple models would, therefore, suggest that temporary sales play a central role in price responses to cost shocks. We find, however, that, in response to a wholesale cost increase, the entire increase in retail prices comes through regular price increases. Sales actually respond temporarily in the opposite direction from regular prices, as though to conceal the price hike. Additional evidence from responses to commodity cost and local unemployment shocks, as well as broader evidence from BLS data reinforces these findings. We present institutional evidence that sales are complex contingent contracts, determined substantially in advance. We show theoretically that these institutional practices leave little money “on the table”: in a price-discrimination model of sales, dynamically adjusting the size of sales yields only a tiny increase in profits.

This paper considers model worlds in which there is a continuum of individuals who form finite-sized associations to undertake joint activities. We show how, through a suitable choice of commodity space, restrictions on the composition of feasible groups can be incorporated into the specification of the consumption and production sets of the economy. We also show that if there are a finite number of types, then the classical results from the competitive analysis of convex finite-agent economies can be reinterpreted to apply.

A bivariate Granger-causality test on money and output finds statistically significant causality when data are measured in log levels, but not when they are measured in first differences of the logs. Which of these results is right? The answer to that question matters because a finding of no Granger-causality from money to output would substantially embarrass existing business cycle models in which money plays an important role [Eichenbaum and Singleton (1986)]. Monte Carlo simulation experiments indicate that, most probably, the first difference results reflect lack of power, whereas the level results reflect Granger-causality that is actually in the data.

This paper analyses the effects of open market operations on interest rates in a model in which agents must pay a fixed cost to exchange assets and cash. Asset markets are endogenously segmented in that some agents choose to pay the fixed cost and some do not. When the fixed cost is zero, the model reduces to the standard one in which persistent money injections increase nominal interest rates, flatten the yield curve, and lead to a downward-sloping yield curve on average. In contrast, if markets are sufficiently segmented, then persistent money injections decrease interest rates, steepen or even twist the yield curve, and lead to an upward-sloping yield curve on average.

In this paper, we study the optimal design of financial safety nets under limited private credit. We ask when it is optimal to restrict ex ante the set of investors that can receive public liquidity support ex post. When the government can commit, the optimal safety net covers all investors. Introducing a wedge between identical investors is inefficient. Without commitment, an optimally designed financial safety net covers only a subset of investors. Compared to an economy where all investors are protected, this results in more liquid portfolios, better social insurance, and higher ex ante welfare. Our result can rationalize the prevalent limited coverage of safety nets, such as the lender of last resort facilities.

This paper studies lifetime aggregate labor supply with endogenous workweek length. Such a theory is needed to evaluate various government policies. A key feature of our model is a nonlinear mapping from hours worked to labor services. This gives rise to an endogenous workweek that can differ across occupations. The theory determines what fraction of the lifetime an individual works, not when. We find that constraints on workweek length have different consequences for total hours than total labor services. Also, we find that policies designed to increase the length of the working life may not increase aggregate lifetime labor supply.

In the early 1980’s, the world steel market collapsed. Since the almost exclusive use of iron-ore is in steel production, many iron-ore mines had to be shut down. We divide the major iron-ore producing countries into groups based on the threat of closure faced by iron-ore mines in the respective country. In countries where mines faced no threat of closure, the iron-ore industry had little or no productivity gain over the decade. In countries where mines faced a large threat of closure, the industry typically had productivity gains ranging from 50 to 100 percent, gains that were unprecedented. We then argue that these productivity increases were not driven by new technology or by the closing of low productivity mines. Hence, the productivity gains were driven by continuing mines, using existing technology, increasing their productivity in order to stay in operation.

This paper develops a methodology for predicting the impact of trade liberalization on exports by industry (3-digit ISIC) based on the pre-liberalization distribution of exports by product (5-digit SITC). Using the results of Kehoe and Ruhl (2013) that much of the growth in trade after trade liberalization is in products that are traded very little or not at all, we predict that industries with a higher share of exports generated by least traded products will experience more growth. Using our methodology, we develop predictions for industry-level changes in trade for the United States and Korea following the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS). As a test for our methodology, we show that it performs significantly better than the applied general equilibrium models originally used for the policy evaluation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

This paper is a primer on the great depressions methodology developed by Cole and Ohanian (1999, 2007) and Kehoe and Prescott (2002, 2007). We use growth accounting and simple dynamic general equilibrium models to study the depression that occurred in Finland in the early 1990s. We find that the sharp drop in real GDP over the period 1990–93 was driven by a combination of a drop in total factor productivity (TFP) during 1990–92 and of increases in taxes on labor and consumption and increases in government consumption during 1989–94, which drove down hours worked in Finland. We attempt to endogenize the drop in TFP in variants of the model with an investment sector and with terms-of-trade shocks but are unsuccessful.

We address this question in a heterogeneous-agent incomplete-markets model featuring exogenous idiosyncratic risk, endogenous skill investment, and flexible labor supply. The tax and transfer schedule is restricted to be log-linear in income, a good description of the US system. Rising inequality is modeled as a combination of skill-biased technical change and growth in residual wage dispersion. When facing shifts in the income distribution like those observed in the US, a utilitarian planner chooses higher progressivity in response to larger residual inequality but lower progressivity in response to widening skill price dispersion reflecting technical change. Overall, optimal progressivity is approximately unchanged between 1980 and 2016. We document that the progressivity of the actual US tax and transfer system has similarly changed little since 1980, in line with the model prescription.

This paper studies the incidence and efficiency of a progressive income tax in a spatial equilibrium. We use US census data to estimate an empirical spatial equilibrium with heterogeneous workers, landowners, and firms. The US income tax shifts skilled workers out of high-productivity cities, leading to a deadweight loss of 2% of tax revenue. Flattening the tax schedule significantly increases welfare inequality between skilled and unskilled workers and does not increase overall worker welfare, as the efficiency gains are captured by landowners. This suggests that progressive income taxes reduce welfare inequality without reducing total worker welfare.

We show that cities with higher population density specialize in high-skill service jobs that can be done remotely. The urban and industry bias of remote work potential shaped the recent pandemic’s economic impact. Many high-skill service workers started to work remotely, withdrawing spending from big-city consumer service industries dependent on their demand. As a result, low-skill service workers in big cities bore most of the recent pandemic’s economic impact. Our findings have broader implications for the distributional consequences of the U.S. economy’s transition to more remote work.

We use new data on the pre- and post-migration wages of U.S. immigrants to measure the importance of human capital for development accounting. Wages increase at migration, but by less than half of the gap in GDP per worker. This finding implies that human capital accounts for a large share of cross-country income differences. Wage gains decline with education, consistent with imperfect substitution between skill types. We bound the human capital share in development accounting to between one-half and two-thirds; additional assumptions lead to an estimate of 60 percent. We also provide results on the importance of assimilation and skill transfer.

We study the urban structure of the City of Detroit. Following many decades of decline, the city’s current urban structure is clearly not optimal for its size, with a business district immediately surrounded by a ring of largely vacant neighborhoods. We propose a model with residential externalities that features multiple equilibria at the neighborhood level. In particular, developing a residential area requires the coordination of developers and residents, without which it may remain vacant even if its fundamentals are sound. We embed this mechanism in a quantitative spatial economics model and use it to rationalize current city allocations. We then use the model to evaluate existing strategic visions to revitalize Detroit, and to design alternative plans that rely on ‘development guarantees’ to yield better outcomes. The widespread effects of these policies underscore the importance of using a general equilibrium framework to evaluate policy proposals.

This paper studies the short- and long-run effects of large firms on economic development. We use evidence from one of the largest multinationals of the 20th century: the United Fruit Company (UFCo). The firm was given a large land concession in Costa Rica—one of the so-called "Banana Republics"—from 1899 to 1984. Using administrative census data with census-block geo-references from 1973 to 2011, we implement a geographic regression discontinuity design that exploits a quasi-random assignment of land. We find that the firm had a positive and persistent effect on living standards. Company documents explain that a key concern at the time was to attract and maintain a sizable workforce, which induced the firm to invest heavily in local amenities that can account for our result. Consistent with this mechanism, we show, empirically and through a proposed model, that the firm's welfare effect is increasing in worker mobility.

To measure labor market power in the US economy, we develop a tractable quantitative, general equilibrium, oligopsony model of the labor market. We estimate key model parameters by matching the firm-level relationship between labor market share and employment size and wage responses to state corporate tax changes. The model quantitatively replicates quasi-experimental evidence on (i) imperfect productivity-wage pass-through, (ii) strategic behavior of dominant employers, and (iii) the local labor market impact of mergers. We then measure welfare losses relative to the efficient allocation. Accounting for transition dynamics, we quantify welfare losses from labor market power relative to the efficient allocation as roughly 6 percent of lifetime consumption. An analytical decomposition attributes equal parts to dead-weight losses and misallocation. Lastly, we find that declining local concentration added 4 ppt to labor's share of income between 1977 and 2013.

White, non-college-educated Americans born in the 1960s face shorter life expectancies, higher medical expenses, and lower wages per unit of human capital compared with those born in the 1940s, and men's wages declined more than women's. After documenting these changes, we use a life-cycle model of couples and singles to evaluate their effects. The drop in wages depressed the labor supply of men and increased that of women, especially in married couples. Their shorter life expectancy reduced their retirement savings but the increase in out-of-pocket medical expenses increased them by more. Welfare losses, measured as a one-time asset compensation, are 12.5%, 8%, and 7.2% of the present discounted value of earnings for single men, couples, and single women, respectively. Lower wages explain 47-58% of these losses, shorter life expectancies 25-34%, and higher medical expenses account for the rest.

We study the optimal design of student financial aid as a function of parental income. We derive optimal financial aid formulas in a general model. For a simple model version, we derive mild conditions on primitives under which poorer students receive more aid even without distributional concerns. We quantitatively extend this result to an empirical model of selection into college for the United States that comprises multidimensional heterogeneity, endogenous parental transfers, dropout, labor supply in college, and uncertain returns. Optimal financial aid is strongly declining in parental income even without distributional concerns. Equity and efficiency go hand in hand.

I analyze the dynamic effects of immigration by estimating an equilibrium model of local labor markets in the US. The model includes firms in multiple cities and sectors which combine capital, skilled and unskilled labor in production, and forward-looking workers who choose their sector and location each period as a dynamic discrete choice. A counterfactual unskilled immigration inflow leads to an initial wage drop for unskilled workers and a wage increase for skilled workers. These effects dissipate rapidly as unskilled workers migrate away from heavily affected cities and workers shift toward unskilled intensive industries. Effects on lifetime utility are small.

How much wage inequality in Brazil is caused by firing costs? To answer this question, I develop and estimate a general equilibrium search and matching model with heterogeneous layoff rates among firms. Using matched employer-employee data from Brazil, I estimate the model, and I find that it replicates the observed residual wage inequality in the data. I simulate a counterfactual removal of existing firing costs, and I find that residual wage inequality drops by 26% as measured by wage variance and by 4.4% as measured by the p95-p5 ratio among 25- to 55-year-old males working in the private sector with at most a high school degree. Worker welfare among this subgroup of households increases by almost 1% in response to the abolishment of firing costs.

To infer social preferences regarding the relative earnings of spouses, we use measurement error in the earnings reported for married couples in the Current Population Survey. We compare the earnings reported for husbands and wives in the survey with their “true” earnings as reported by their employers to tax authorities. Compared with couples where the wife earns just less than the husband, those where she earns just more are 15.9 percentage points more likely to under-report her relative earnings. This pattern reflects the reporting behavior of both husbands and wives and is consistent with a norm that husbands out-earn their wives.

This paper aims at an improved understanding of the relationship between monetary policy and racial inequality. We investigate the distributional effects of monetary policy in a unified framework, linking monetary policy shocks both to earnings and wealth differentials between black and white households. Specifically, we show that, although a more accommodative monetary policy increases employment of black households more than white households, the overall effects are small. At the same time, an accommodative monetary policy shock exacerbates the wealth difference between black and white households, because black households own less financial assets that appreciate in value. Over multi-year time horizons, the employment effects are substantially smaller than the countervailing portfolio effects. We conclude that there is little reason to think that accommodative monetary policy plays a significant role in reducing racial inequities in the way often discussed. On the contrary, it may well accentuate inequalities for extended periods.

COVID symptom screening, a new workplace practice, is likely to affect many millions of American workers in the coming months. Eleven states already require and federal guidance recommends frequent screening of employees for infection symptoms. This paper provides some of the first empirical work exploring the tradeoffs employers face in using daily symptom screening. First, we find that common symptom checkers will likely screen out up to 7 percent of workers each day, depending on the measure used. Second, we find that the measures used will matter for three reasons: many respondents report any given symptom, survey design affects responses, and demographic groups report symptoms at different rates, even absent fluctuations in likely COVID exposure. This last pattern can potentially lead to disparate impacts, and is important from an equity standpoint.

We examine the determinants of COVID-19 risk exposure in the context of the initial wave in New York City. During the beginning of the first wave of the pandemic, out-of-home activity related to commuting was strongly associated with COVID-19 cases at the ZIP code level and hospitalization at an individual level. After layoffs of workers decreased commuting, case growth continued through household crowding. A larger share of individuals in crowded housing, or commuting to essential and frontline work, are Black, Hispanic, and lower-income—which contributes to disparities in disease risk. As a result, our paper shows that structural socio-economic inequalities help determine the cross-section of COVID-19 risk exposure in urban areas.

We use panel data covering 118 million homes in the United States, merged with geolocation detail for 75,000 taxing entities, to document a nationwide "assessment gap" which leads local governments to place a disproportionate fiscal burden on racial and ethnic minorities. We show that holding jurisdictions and property tax rates fixed, black and Hispanic residents nonetheless face a 10-13% higher tax burden for the same bundle of public services. This assessment gap arises through two channels. First, property assessments are less sensitive to neighborhood attributes than market prices are. This generates racially correlated spatial variation in tax burden within jurisdiction. Second, appeals behavior and appeals outcomes differ by race. This results in higher assessment growth rates for minority residents. We propose an alternate approach for constructing assessments based on small-geography home price indexes, and show that this reduces inequality by at least 55-70%.

Cities with cleaner power plants and lower energy demand have stricter land use restrictions; these restrictions increase housing prices and disincentivize living in these lower polluting cities. We use a spatial equilibrium model to quantify the effect of land use restrictions on household carbon emissions. Our model features heterogeneous households, cities that vary by power plant technology and the benefits of energy usage, as well as endogenous wages and rents. Relaxing restrictions in California to the national median leads to a 2.3% drop in national carbon emissions. The burden of a carbon tax differs substantially across locations.

Wages grow but also become more unequal as workers age. Using German administrative data, we largely attribute both life-cycle facts to one driving force: some workers progress in hierarchy to jobs with more responsibility, complexity, and independence. In short, they climb the career ladder. Climbing the career ladder explains 50% of wage growth and virtually all of rising wage dispersion. The increasing gender wage gap by age parallels a rising hierarchy gap. Our findings suggest that wage dynamics are shaped by the organization of production, which itself likely depends on technology, the skill set of the workforce, and labor market institutions.

Workers are unequal in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic: Those who work in essential sectors face higher health risk whereas those in non-essential social-consumption sectors face greater economic risk. We study how these health and economic risks cascade into other sectors through supply chains and demand linkages. In the U.S., we find the cascading effects account for about 25-30% of the exposure to both risks. The cascading effect increases the health risk faced by workers in the transportation and retail sectors, and it increases the economic risk faced by workers in the textile and petroleum sectors. We provide sectoral estimates of the health and economic risk for 42 other countries in an online interactive document.

Does job loss cause less economic damage if your parents are higher-income, and what are the implications for intergenerational mobility? In this paper we show that following a layoff, adult children born to parents in the bottom 20% of the income distribution have almost double the unemployment compared with those born to parents in the top 20%, with 118% higher present discounted value losses in earnings. Next, we show that these disparate impacts of job loss have important implications for inequality and intergenerational mobility. They increase the 80:20 income inequality ratio for those impacted by 8% and increase the rank-rank coefficient by 34%, implying large reductions in intergenerational mobility. In a simulation based on our main results, we show that the age 40 rank-rank correlation is 3.9% higher due to the disparate impact and incidence of job loss over the preceding decade. In the last part of the paper, we explore mechanisms and show that "baked in" advantages play an important role in explaining these differences.

There have been growing concerns about long-haulers or individuals with long-term COVID-19 health complications (long-haul COVID). While the medical field has been investigating the health complications, there has been limited research on the relationship between long-haul COVID and labor market outcomes. To investigate this relationship, I used the University of Southern California Understanding America Study COVID-19 longitudinal survey to provide a snapshot of mid-2021. I first find about 24.1% of individuals who have had COVID are long-haulers and 25.9% of long-haulers reported that their long-haul COVID affected employment or work hours. I then find that a majority of these affected long-haulers remained employed and in same employment type. But I find that their mean change in work hours and paycheck declined. Afterwards, I tested whether long-haul COVID is associated with negative changes in labor market outcomes. When I combined long-haulers who reported that their health complications did or did not affect work, I failed to find that long-haulers are less likely to be employed relative to individuals without prior COVID infection. But, when I discern long-haulers by whether long-haul COVID affected work, I find that long-haulers who reported long-haul COVID affected work are 10 percentage points less likely to be employed and, on average, work 50% fewer hours than individuals without prior COVID infection. In contrast, I failed to find evidence that affected long-haulers receive a lower paycheck earning relative to individuals without prior COVID infection. Lastly, when comparing these affected long-haulers against similar individuals, I find evidence that they are more impacted in their employed status and work hours. Due to limitations, future data collection and research would provide a more robust picture.

We build a New Keynesian business-cycle model with rich household heterogeneity. In the model, systematic monetary stabilization policy affects the distribution of income, income risks, and the demand for funds and supply of assets: the demand, because matching frictions render idiosyncratic labor-market risk endogenous; the supply, because markups, adjustment costs, and the tax system mean that the average profitability of firms is endogenous. Disagreement about systematic monetary stabilization policy is pronounced. The wealth-rich or retired tend to favor inflation targeting. The wealth-poor working class, instead, favors unemployment-centric policy. One- and two-agent alternatives can show unanimous disapproval of inflation-centric policy, instead. We highlight how the political support for inflation-centric policy depends on wage setting, the tax system, and the portfolio that households have.

During the French Revolution, more than 100,000 individuals, predominantly supporters of the Old Regime, fled France. As a result, some areas experienced a significant change in the composition of the local elites whereas in others the pre-revolutionary social structure remained virtually intact. In this study, we trace the consequences of the émigrés' flight on economic performance at the local level. We instrument emigration intensity with local temperature shocks during an inflection point of the Revolution, the summer of 1792, marked by the abolition of the constitutional monarchy and bouts of local violence. Our findings suggest that émigrés have a non monotonic effect on comparative development. During the 19th century, there is a significant negative impact on income per capita, which becomes positive from the second half of the 20th century onward. This pattern can be partially attributed to the reduction in the share of the landed elites in high-emigration regions. We show that the resulting fragmentation of agricultural holdings reduced labor productivity, depressing overall income levels in the short run; however, it facilitated the rise in human capital investments, eventually leading to a reversal in the pattern of regional comparative development.