We document the consequences of real exchange rate movements for the employment, hours, and hourly earnings of workers in manufacturing industries across individual states. Exchange rates have statistically significant wage and employment implications in these local labor markets. The importance...

Using data from a variety of sources, this paper comprehensively documents the dramatic changes in the manufacturing sector and the large decline in employment rates and hours worked among prime-aged Americans since 2000. We use cross-region variation to explore the link between declining...

We examine local labor markets in the U.S. and Canada from 1990 to 2011 using comparable household and business data. Wage levels and inequality rise with city population in both countries, albeit less in Canada. Neither country saw wage levels converge despite contrasting migration patterns...

In this paper I examine regional labor market behavior in the United States and Japan. In contrast with the picture at the aggregate level, Japanese labor markets at the prefectural (regional) level appear to exhibit substantially more persistence than state level labor markets in the United...

We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on local U.S. labor markets, exploiting cross-market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization while instrumenting for imports using changes in Chinese imports by...

The persistence of U.S. unemployment has risen with each of the last three recessions, raising the specter that future U.S. recessions might look more like the Eurosclerosis experience of the 1980s than traditional V-shaped recoveries of the past. In this paper, we revisit possible explanations...

One of the most important debates among health economists in rich nations is whether advances in biotechnology will spare their health care systems from a financial crisis. We must consider that prevalence rates of chronic diseases declined during the twentieth century and that this rate of...

Forecasts of the rate of price inflation play a central role in the formulation of monetary policy, and forecasting inflation is a key job for economists at the Federal Reserve Board. This paper examines whether this job has become harder and, to the extent that it has, what changes in the...

This paper examines the likely growth of U.S. GDP in the decade beginning in 2010. I analyze the two components of the rise in GDP over this ten year period: (1) the recovery from the substantially depressed level of economic activity at the start of the decade; and (2) the rise in potential GDP that...

This article examines the performance of various financial variables as predictors of subsequent U.S. recessions. Series such as interest rates and spreads, stock prices, currencies, and monetary aggregates are evaluated singly and in comparison with other financial and non-financial indicators....