Housing, portfolio choice, and the macroeconomcy

Much of the macroeconomics literature dealing with wealth distribution has become abstracted from modeling housing explicitly. This paper investigates the properties of the wealth distribution and the portfolio composition regarding housing and equity holdings and their relationship to macroeconomic shocks. To this end, I construct a business cycle model in which agents differ in age, income, and wealth and derive utility from housing services. The model is consistent with several facts such as the life-cycle pattern of housing-to-wealth ratios, the larger degree of concentration for nonhousing wealth, and the smaller weight of housing in richer households’ portfolios as well as the larger housing-to-wealth ratios in recessions. In addition, the model delivers the familiar business-cycle moments regarding relative standard deviations and procyclicality of consumption, investment, and employment

Housing tenure and wealth distribution in life-cycle economies

Common practice in the housing and wealth distribution literature has proceeded as if the modeling of housing rental markets was unnecessary due to renters’ relative low levels of wealth and the small fraction they represent in the total population. This paper shows, however, that their inclusion matters substantially when dealing with wealth concentration over the life cycle. Renters are concentrated in the poorer and younger groups. This concentration results in a pattern of housing wealth concentration over an agent’s life that is decreasing, with a slope as steep as that of nonhousing (or financial) wealth. The author constructs an overlapping-generations economy with a housing rental market that is consistent with this fact.

Capital-skill complementarity and inequality: a sensitivity analysis

In “Capital-Skill Complementarity and Inequality: A Macroeconomic Analysis,” Krusell et al. (2000) analyzed the capital-skill complementarity hypothesis as an explanation for the behavior of the U.S. skill premium. This paper shows that their model’s fit and the values of the estimated parameters are very sensitive to the data used: Alternative measures of the capital series predict skill premia that bear little resemblance to the data. We also include ten additional years of data to address the claim made by other authors that the evolution of the skill premium changed during the 1990s, but we find little evidence of this change.

Accounting for the cyclical dynamics of income shares

Over the business cycle, labor's share of output is negatively but weakly correlated with output, and it lags output by about four quarters. Profit's share is strongly procyclical. It neither leads nor lags output, and its volatility is about four times that of output. Despite the importance of understanding the dynamics of income shares for understanding aggregate technology and the degree of competition in factor markets, macroeconomics lacks models that can account for these dynamics. This paper constructs a model that can replicate those facts. We introduce costly entry of firms in a model with frictional labor markets and find a link between the ability of the model to replicate income shares' dynamics and the ability of the model to amplify and propagate shocks. That link is a countercyclical real interest rate, a well-known fact in U.S. data but a feature that models of aggregate fluctuations have had difficulty achieving.

Is more still better? Revisiting the Sixth District Coincident Indicator

A revised version of the D6 Factor model of the southeastern economy is better than the original at describing contemporary economic activity and allows for historical comparisons across several business cycles.

Uninsurable individual risk and the cyclical behavior of unemployment and vacancies

This paper is concerned with the business cycle dynamics in search-and-matching models of the labor market when agents are ex post heterogeneous. We focus on wealth heterogeneity that comes as a result of imperfect opportunities to insure against idiosyncratic risk. We show that this heterogeneity implies wage rigidity relative to a complete insurance economy. The fraction of wealth-poor agents prevents real wages from falling too much in recessions since small decreases in income imply large losses in utility. Analogously, wages rise less in expansions compared with the standard model because small increases are enough for poor workers to accept job offers. This mechanism reduces the volatility of wages and increases the volatility of vacancies and unemployment. This channel can be relevant if the lack of insurance is large enough so that the fraction of agents close to the borrowing constraint is significant. However, discipline in the parameterization implies an earnings variance and persistence in the unemployment state that result in a large degree of self-insurance.

When more is better: assessing the southeastern economy with lots of data

The authors estimate a model that provides a single indicator for the southeastern economy, making it easier for policymakers and analysts to assess regional economic conditions and compare them to the broader economy.Federal Reserve District, 6th ; Econometric models

Crude substitution: the cyclical dynamics of oil prices and the college premium

Higher oil price shocks benefit unskilled workers relative to skilled workers: Over the business cycle, energy prices and the skill premium display a strong negative correlation. This correlation is robust to different detrending procedures. We construct and estimate a model economy with energy use and heterogeneous skills and study its business cycle implications, in particular the cyclical behavior of oil prices and the skill premium. In our model economy, the skill premium and the ratio of hours worked by skilled workers to hours worked by unskilled workers are both negatively correlated with oil prices over the business cycle. For the skill premium and energy prices to move in opposite directions, the key ingredient is the larger substitutability of capital for unskilled labor than for skilled labor. The negative correlation arises even when energy and capital are fairly good substitutes.

Fixed-Term and Permanent Employment Contracts: Theory and Evidence

This paper constructs a theory of the coexistence of fixed-term and permanent employment contracts in an environment with ex-ante identical workers and employers. Workers under fixed-term contracts can be dismissed at no cost while permanent employees enjoy labor protection. In a labor market characterized by search and matching frictions, firms find it optimal to discriminate by offering some workers a fixedterm contract while offering other workers a permanent contract. Match-specific quality between a worker and a firm determines the type of contract offered. We analytically characterize the firm’s hiring and firing rules. Using matched employer-employee data from Canada, we estimate the model’s parameters. Increasing the level of firing costs increases wage inequality and decreases the unemployment rate. The increase in inequality results from a larger fraction of temporary workers and not from an increase in the wage premium earned by permanent workers.Labour markets; Potential output; Productivity

Fixed-Term and Permanent Employment Contracts: Theory and Evidence

This paper constructs a theory of the coexistence of fixed-term and permanent employment contracts in an environment with ex-ante identical workers and employers. Workers under fixed-term contracts can be dismissed at no cost while permanent employees enjoy labor protection. In a labor market characterized by search and matching frictions, firms find optimal to discriminate by offering some workers a fixed-term contract while offering other workers a permanent contract. Match-specific quality between a worker and a firm determines the type of contract offered. We analytically characterize the firm’s hiring and firing rules. Using matched employer-employee data from Canada, we estimate the wage equations from the model. The effects of firing costs on wage inequality vary dramatically depending on whether search externalities are taken or not into account.employment protection, unemployment, dual labor markets, wage inequality