Rigidity in wages has long been thought to impede the functioning of labor markets. One recent strand of the research on wage flexibility in the United States and elsewhere has focused on the possibility of downward nominal wage rigidity and what implications such rigidity might have for the...

The standard model of permanent and transitory income is known to be misspecified. Estimates of income volatility in the model differ depending on the type of data moments used—levels or differences—and how these moments are weighted in the estimation. We propose two changes to the standard...

Using a panel of tax data, we follow the earnings of individuals over business cycles. Compared to prior recessions, the Covid policy response and recovery were far more progressive. Among workers starting in the bottom quintile, median real earnings including fiscal relief increased 66 percent...

This paper studies the link between rising income uncertainty and household fertility patterns in an Aiyagari-Bewley-Huggett framework augmented to include fertility decisions and infertility risk. Building on Becker and Tomes (1976), I model fertility decisions as sequential, irreversible...

We document a clear downward trend in labor market fluidity that is common across a variety of measures of worker and job turnover. This trend dates to at least the early 1980s if not somewhat earlier. Next we pull together evidence on a variety of hypotheses that might explain this downward...

Using data from the PSID, we find that household income has become noticeably more volatile during the past thirty years. We estimate that the standard deviation of percent changes in household income rose one-fourth between the early 1970s and early 2000s. This widening in the distribution of...

Participants in meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) regularly produce individual projections of real activity and inflation that are published in summary form. These summaries indicate participants' views about the most likely course for the macro-economy but, by themselves, are...

Workhorse search and matching models assume constant bargaining weights, while recent evidence indicates that weights vary across time and in cross section. We endogenize bargaining weights in a life-cycle search and matching model by replacing a standard Cobb-Douglas (CD) matching function with...

In this paper, we use detailed trade and transactions data for the U.S. manufacturing sector to empirically analyze the direction and magnitude of the association between firm-level exposure to trade and the volatility of employment growth. We find that, relative to purely domestic firms, firms...

In this paper, we use detailed trade and transactions data for the U.S. manufacturing sector to empirically analyze the direction and magnitude of the association between firm-level exposure to trade and the volatility of employment growth. We find that, relative to purely domestic firms, firms...