We analyze the relationship between housing and the business cycle in a set of 51 U.S. cities. Most surprisingly, we find that declines in house prices are often not followed by declines in employment. We also find that national permits are a better leading indicator for a city's employment than...

Recent declines in job tenure have coincided with a shift away from traditional defined benefit (DB) pensions, which reward long tenure. New evidence also points to an increase in job-to-job movements by workers, and we document gains in relative wages of job-to-job movers over a similar period....

In this paper, we propose a new family of multivariate loss functions that can be used to test the rationality of vector forecasts without assuming independence across individual variables. When only one variable is of interest, the loss function reduces to the flexible asymmetric family...

We find that the magnitudes of the regional effects of monetary policy were considerably dampened during the Volcker-Greenspan era. For this era, regional differences in the depths and total costs of monetary-policy-induced recessions were related to the concentration of the banking sector.

The ability to retire at an age and in a manner of one’s choosing depends on one’s ability to retain or find employment at older ages, which depends in turn on local labor market conditions. We investigate how local labor markets affect retirement transitions. We match households from the...

A key question that has arisen during recent debates is whether government spending multipliers are larger during times when resources are idle. This paper seeks to shed light on this question by analyzing new quarterly historical data covering multiple large wars and depressions in the U.S. and...

We analyze the effects of outsourcing in the presence of a minimum wage by presenting a general-equilibrium model with an oligopolistic export sector and a competitive import-competing sector. An outsourcing tax is politically popular because it switches jobs to unemployed natives. It is also...