Women\u27s Track & Field Team Wins CCC Championship

The Roger Williams Women\u27s Track & Field team won the CCC Championship for the second year in a row on a Saturday afternoon

Private Lorraine J. Turnbull

Pvt. Lorraine Turnbull was one of the thousands of American women to enlist in the Marine Corps Women\u27s Reserve (MCWR) during the Second World War. Turnbull was one of the 500 women Marines selected out of a pool of 8,000 Women Reservists serving in the field of aviation for duty in Hawaii. Using hundreds of the letters written by Turnbull during her war experience, one is able to piece together the true impact of the war upon WWII military women. Using select letters written by Turnbull, this research project focuses on the elements of sexism women experienced in the MCWR, the significance of letter writing to these women, the true importance of the MCWR during WWII, and the overall expansion of opportunity given to Women Reservists through the MCWR

Shocks and the economic outlook

The U.S. economy has recently been hit by a number of supply shocks, and businesses and consumers have seen oil, food, and materials prices rise as a result. Such shocks typically take several years to play themselves out completely. I apply a downsized version of a macroeconomic forecasting model in use at the Cleveland Fed to project the likely quantitative impact of the shocks on GDP growth and consumer prices.Forecasting

On the Cyclicality of Labor Market Mismatch and Aggregate Employment Flows

This paper combines a discrete-time dynamic general equilibrium articulation of the standard model of labor market search with observed U.S. time series measures on employment, vacancies, and aggregate output to uncover the cyclical properties of three unobserved forcing variables that comprise the exogenous state of the aggregate labor market: labor productivity, the rate of job separation, and the allocational efficiency of the labor market. We posit the latter variable to be inversely related to the degree of mismatch in the pool of searching workers and vacancies, given numbers of each, and identify its movements as scalar shifts in the standard matching function. Given that the model exactly reconciles observed net employment changes, our procedure also implies measured time series of the flows into and out of employment. We find that labor productivity, the job separation rate and allocational efficiency are all procyclical with the latter two highly variable. These cyclical patterns lead to procyclical implied gross employment flows, thereby concentrating labor force reallocation during booms. We discuss the implications for conventional views of business cycle fluctuations and for the standard search theories of labor market behavior.

Diagnosing labor market search models: a multiple-shock approach

We construct a multiple-shock version of the Mortensen-Pissarides labor market search model to investigate the basic model’s well-known tendency to underpredict the volatility of key labor market variables. Data on U.S. job-finding and job separation probabilities are used to help estimate the parameters of a three-dimensional shock process comprising labor productivity, job separation, and matching or “allocative” efficiency. Although our multiple-shock model generates some more volatility, it has counterfactual implications for the cyclicality of unemployment and vacancies. Our second exercise forces the model to be the data-generating process to uncover the necessary realizations of all three shocks. We show that the Mortensen-Pissarides labor market search model requires significantly procyclical and volatile matching efficiency and job separations to simultaneously account for high procyclical variations in job-finding probabilities as well as relatively small net employment changes in the data. Hence, the model is more fundamentally flawed than its inability to amplify shocks would suggest. We also show that variation in job separations accounts for most of the employment fluctuations, suggesting that endogenous separations could be the key feature of an improved model. This leads us to conclude that the model lacks mechanisms to generate procyclical matching efficiency and labor force reallocation. As for the latter, we conjecture that nontrivial labor force participation and job-to-job transitions are promising avenues of research. Note: This paper is a revised version of an earlier working paper of the same title, WP 07-20.Labor market ; Business cycles

A medium scale forecasting model for monetary policy

This paper presents a 16-variable Bayesian VAR forecasting model of the U.S. economy for use in a monetary policy setting. The variables that comprise the model are selected not only for their effectiveness in forecasting the primary variables of interest, but also for their relevance to the monetary policy process. In particular, the variables largely coincide with those of an augmented New-Keynesian DSGE model. We provide out-of sample forecast evaluations and illustrate the computation and use of predictive densities and fan charts. Although the reduced form model is the focus of the paper, we also provide an example of structural analysis to illustrate the macroeconomic response of a monetary policy shock.Forecasting ; Monetary policy

Sampling international migrants with origin-based snowballing method:

This paper provides a methodological assessment of the advantages and drawbacks of the origin-based snowballing technique as a reliable method to construct representative samples of international migrants in destination areas. Using data from the MAFE-Senegal Project, our results indicate that this is a very risky method in terms of quantitative success. Besides, it implies some clear selection biases: it over-represents migrants more strongly connected to their home country, and it tends to overestimate both poverty in households at origin and the influence of previous migration experiences of social networks on individuals’ out-migration.international migration, sample, survey methodology