Research Database

Ex ante optima are described for two examples of a monetary model with random meetings, some perfectly monitored people, and some nonmonitored people. One example describes optimal inflation, the other optimal seasonal policy. Although the numerical examples are arbitrary in most respects, the results are consistent with three general conclusions: if the model is known, then intervention is desirable; even the qualitative aspects of optimal intervention are not obvious; and optimal intervention depends on the details of the model. The results are therefore reminiscent of the conclusions of second-best theory.

Women are well represented in some academic fields but notably underrepresented in others, including many STEM fields. Motivated by studies that show collaboration is more attractive to women than men, we investigate whether female participation across academic fields is related to how collaborative those fields are. Using panel data for 30 academic fields from 1975 to 2014, we find that one additional author on the average paper published in a field is associated with an increase of 2.5 percentage points in the female share of PhD recipients. This estimate implies that about 30 percent of the observed rise in female share during our sample period can be attributed to increased collaboration.

This article is largely a description of inequality of earnings, income, and wealth in the United States in 2007 as measured by the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF). We look at inequality in relation to various characteristics such as age, education, employment status, marital status, and whether households are late payers or include bankruptcy filers. We also look at economic mobility. We compare these variables in 2007 with their values in our earlier study in 1998.

Macroeconomics has made tremendous advances following the introduction of labor supply into the field. Today, it is widely acknowledged that labor supply matters for many key economic issues, particularly for business cycles and tax policy analysis. However, the extent to which labor supply matters for such questions depends on the aggregate labor supply elasticity—that is, the sensitivity of the time allocation between market and nonmarket activities. For several decades, the magnitude of the aggregate labor supply elasticity has been the subject of much debate. In this article, we review the debate and conclude that the elasticity of labor supply of the aggregate household is much higher than the elasticity of the identical households being aggregated. The aggregate household utility function differs from the individuals’ utility functions for the same reason that the aggregate production function differs from the individual firms’ production functions being aggregated. The differences in individual and aggregate supply elasticities are what aggregation theory predicts.

Applied macroeconomists interested in identifying the sources of business cycle fluctuations typically have no more than 40 or 50 years of data at a quarterly frequency. With sample sizes that small, identification may not be possible even with correctly specified representations of the data. In this article, I investigate whether small samples are indeed a problem for some commonly used statistical representations. I compare three—a vector autoregressive moving average (VARMA), an unrestricted state space, and a restricted state space—that are all consistent with the same prototype business cycle model. The statistical representations that I consider differ in the amount of a priori theory that is imposed, but all are correctly specified. I find that the identifying assumptions of VARMAs and unrestricted state space representations are too minimal: the range of estimates for statistics of interest for business cycle researchers is so large as to be uninformative.

We revisit recent empirical evidence about the rise in top income inequality in the United States, drawing attention to key issues that we believe are critical for an informed discussion about changing inequality since 1980: the definition of income (labor versus total), the unit of analysis (individual versus tax unit), the importance of partnership and S-corporation income, income shifting between the corporate and personal sectors in response to tax incentives, the definition of the top of the distribution, and trends in the middle and bottom of the distribution. Our goal is to inform researchers, policymakers, and journalists who are interested in top income inequality.

Many researchers, policymakers, and pundits have argued that the housing crisis may harm labor markets because homeowners who owe more than their homes are worth are less likely to move to places that have productive job opportunities. I show that, in the available data, negative equity does not make homeowners less mobile. In fact, homeowners who have negative equity are slightly more likely to move than homeowners who have positive equity. Ferreira, Gyourko, and Tracy’s (2010) contrasting result that negative equity reduces mobility arises because they systematically drop some negative-equity homeowners’ moves from the data.

This memo describes a revision to the mixed-frequency vector autoregression (MF-VAR) model originally constructed by Schorfheide and Song (2012) and subsequently revised by Beauchemin (2013). In this most recent version, the 14-variable model is expanded to include nonfarm payroll employment. The forecast performance of the augmented model is compared with that of its predecessor.