Research Database

This online appendix accompanies Staff Report 620: Star Wars at Central Banks.

Supplemental data and code for replication.

This appendix contains the pre-registered analysis for our comment on “Star Wars: The Empirics Strike Back” by Brodeur et al (2016). To structure the analysis, we reproduce the pre-registration; our results appear in red under each of the relevant parts. The time-stamped version of the pre-registration is available from the Open Science Framework website at the address https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/58MNJ.

To understand this appendix deeply, we recommend carefully reading Brodeur et al (2016). The body of our comment paper outlines only the intuition of their method. In some of the figures presented in this appendix, we use labels that differ from those in Brodeur et al. (2016), and we do so to more clearly connect to the intuition we offer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

While the savings of retired singles tend to fall with age, those of retired couples tend to rise. We estimate a rich model of retired singles and couples with bequest motives and uncertain longevity and medical expenses. Our estimates imply that while medical expenses are an important driver of the savings of middle-income singles, bequest motives matter for couples and high-income singles, and generate transfers to non-spousal heirs whenever a household member dies. The interaction of medical expenses and bequest motives is a crucial determinant of savings for all retirees. Hence, to understand savings, it is important to model household structure, medical expenses, and bequest motives.