We consider a New Keynesian model with downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) and show that government spending is much more effective in stimulating output in a low-inflation recession relative to a high-inflation recession. The government spending multiplier is large when DNWR binds, but the...

Most governments are mandated to maintain their economies at full employment. We propose that the best marker of full employment is the efficient unemployment rate, u*. We define u* as the unemployment rate that minimizes the nonproductive use of labor--both jobseeking and recruiting. The...

We introduce a form of downward nominal wage rigidity that can vary in intensity across a continuum of labor varieties. The model delivers a static wage Phillips curve linking current wage inflation to current unemployment. For standard parameterizations, the dynamics of the model are...

We introduce dynamic incentive contracts into a model of unemployment dynamics and present three results. First, wage cyclicality from incentives does not dampen unemployment dynamics: the response of unemployment to shocks is first-order equivalent in an economy with flexible incentive pay and...

We show that the largest increase in unemployment benefits in U.S. history had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts. This finding has three implications. First, increased benefits were important for explaining aggregate spending dynamics--but not employment dynamics--during the...

At the onset of the COVID pandemic, the U.S. economy suddenly and swiftly lost 20 million jobs. Over the next two years, the economy has been on the recovery path. We assess the labor market two years into the COVID crisis. We show that early employment dynamics were almost entirely driven by...

Chapter 6 from the forthcoming Inclusive Wealth Report 2022 looks at human capital in greater detail, based on the latest human capital estimates from the Inclusive Wealth Report (IWR) project. In the chapter, which is repeated here, the growth of human capital and several of its constituent...

This paper studies aggregate labor market dynamics when workers have heterogeneous skills for tasks which are subject to non-uniform labor demand shocks. When workers have different skills, movements in aggregate wages partly reflect a reallocation of different workers across tasks and into...

We analyze how output and wages behave under different scenarios for technological progress that may culminate in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), defined as the ability of AI systems to perform all tasks that humans can perform. We assume that human work can be decomposed into atomistic...

Support from local citizens is important for the scale-up of renewable energy. We investigate the impact of utility-scale wind and solar parks on employment, GDP and public finances in Brazilian municipalities using a difference-in-differences design with matching. We find a positive employment...