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Labor market effects of monetary policy across workers and firms
... Exploring the relationship between monetary policy shocks and labor market outcomes in the United States, it was found that contractionary monetary policy shocks lead to a significant increase in unemployment, particularly among younger and less educated workers. Furthermore, a decline in job vacancies and an increase in unemployment duration following such shocks is observed (Gulyas et al., 2023). Therefore, understanding the transmission channels of monetary policy to labor market dynamics provides valuable insights for policymakers aiming to mitigate the adverse effects of monetary policy on employment. ...
This comprehensive study investigates the complex relationship between monetary instruments and Ukraine’s labor market against the backdrop of heightened risks. In the light of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, economic instability, and significant migration dynamics, understanding the role of monetary policies in shaping labor market dynamics is crucial. Employing a robust empirical approach, the research aims to analyze the impact of monetary instruments on key labor market indicators, including employment levels, unemployment rates, and wage dynamics. By utilizing econometric and mathematical methodologies (system of simultaneous equations), the study seeks to provide nuanced insights into the effectiveness of monetary policies in addressing labor market challenges amidst heightened risks. Furthermore, the research tries to identify potential strategies and policy interventions to mitigate adverse effects on the labor market and foster resilience in the face of uncertainty. The findings of this study are anticipated to contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex interplay between monetary policy measures and labor market outcomes in Ukraine. Additionally, the insights derived from this research are expected to inform policymakers, economists, and stakeholders in designing more targeted and effective policy responses to address labor market challenges and promote sustainable economic development. Overall, this study aims to provide valuable insights into the role of monetary instruments in navigating Ukraine’s labor market through turbulent times and fostering resilience in the face of heightened risks.
We analyze the relative efficiency of monetary policy between developed and developing countries by calculating efficiency scores through nonparametric methods and estimating DEA bootstrap efficiency frontiers oriented to both single and multiple outputs, represented by inflation and unemployment. We use a heterogeneous sample of countries from the pre-COVID-19 period because the pandemic severely impacted monetary policy. For developing countries, the combination of an independent central bank with the adoption of an inflation-targeting regime is associated with greater monetary policy efficiency. The 2008 financial crisis reduced efficiency, while corruption control and financial stability improved policy performance. Monetary policy is more efficient in developed countries than in developing countries, regardless of the control variables and model specifications.
Recently developed HANK models, which combine Heterogeneous Agents and New Keynesian frictions, have had a considerable impact on macroeconomics. However, due to the complexity of such models, the literature has focused on numerically solved models and therefore little is known about their general properties. This paper presents a tractable HANK model which integrates Search and Matching (SAM) frictions in the labor market. The model features endogenous idiosyncratic earnings risk which may be procyclical or countercyclical. When this risk is countercyclical, which we argue is the empirically plausible case, there is downward pressure on real interest rates in recessions due to a precautionary saving motive. We show that in this setting (a) the economy may get stuck in a high-unemployment steady state, (b) the Taylor principle is insufficient to eliminate local indeterminacy of the intended steady state, and (c) nominal rigidities and incomplete markets are complementary in terms of amplifying the impact of shocks on the macro economy.
We map ECB policy communication into yield curve changes and study the information flow on policy dates. A byproduct is the publicly available Euro Area Monetary Policy Event-Study Database (EA-MPD), containing intraday asset price changes. We find that Policy Target, Forward Guidance and Quantitative Easing factors capture about all the variation in the yield curve, with different factors appearing in the windows covering the policy decision announcement and the press conference, and having time-varying variance shares. We study sovereign yields, exchange rates, stock prices, persistence of effects and response asymmetry. Our methodology can be implemented for any policy-related event.
Contrary to previous beliefs, recent empirical work has found that the effects of monetary policy on inequality are far from modest. In order to improve our understanding of the channels through which monetary policy has distributional consequences, we build a New Keynesian model with incomplete asset markets, asymmetric search and matching frictions (SAM) across skilled and unskilled workers and, foremost, capital-skill complementarity (CSC) in the production function. Our main result is that an unexpected monetary easing increases labor income inequality between high and low-skilled workers, and that the interaction between CSC and SAM asymmetry is crucial in delivering this result. The increase in labor demand driven by a monetary expansion leads to larger wage increases for high-skilled workers than for low-skilled workers since the former have smaller matching frictions (SAM-asymmetry channel), while the increase in capital demand amplifies this wage divergence due to skilled workers being more complementary to capital than substitutable unskilled workers are (CSC channel). Strict inflation targeting is often the most successful rule in stabilizing measures of earnings inequality even in the presence of shocks which introduce a trade-off between stabilizing inflation and aggregate demand.
keywords: Monetary policy, Search and matching, Capital-skill complementarity, Inequality
JEL: E24, E25, E52, J64
We develop an equilibrium model of on-the-job search with ex ante heterogeneous workers and firms, aggregate uncertainty, and vacancy creation. The model produces rich dynamics in which the distributions of unemployed workers, vacancies, and worker-firm matches evolve stochastically over time. We prove that the surplus function, which fully characterizes the match value and the mobility decision of workers, does not depend on these distributions. This result means the model is tractable and can be estimated. We illustrate the quantitative implications of the model by fitting to US aggregate labor market data from 1951-2012. The model has rich implications for the cyclical dynamics of the distribution of skills of the unemployed, the distribution of types of vacancies posted, and sorting between heterogeneous workers and firms.
We analyze the response of small versus large manufacturing firms to monetary policy. The goal is to obtain evidence on the
importance of financial propagation mechanisms for aggregate activity. We find that small firms account for a significantly
disproportionate share of the manufacturing decline that follows tightening of monetary policy. They play a surprisingly prominent
role in the slowdown of inventory demand. Large firms initially borrow to accumulate inventories. After a brief period, small
firms quickly shed inventories. We attempt to sort financial from nonfinancial explanations with evidence on asymmetries and
on balance sheet effects on inventory demand across size classes.
We document the consequences of losing a job across countries using a harmonized research design applied to seven matched employer-employee datasets. Workers in Denmark and Sweden experience the lowest earnings declines following job displacement, while workers in Italy, Spain, and Portugal experience losses three times as high. French and Austrian workers face earnings losses somewhere in between. Key to these differences is that southern European workers are less likely to find employment following displacement. Loss of employer-specific wage premiums explains a substantial portion of wage losses in all countries. (JEL J31, J63, J64)
We document five facts about the distributional income effects of monetary policy shocks using Swedish administrative individual-level data. (i) The effects of monetary policy shocks are U shaped over the income distribution—that is, expansionary shocks increase the incomes of high- and low-income individuals relative to middle-income individuals. (ii) The large effects in the bottom are accounted for by the labor-income response and (iii) those in the top by the capital-income response. (iv) The heterogeneity in the labor-income response is due to the earnings heterogeneity channel, whereas (v) that in the capital-income response is due to the income composition channel. (JEL D31, E32, E52, J31)
We study the role of markup dispersion and aggregate TFP for monetary transmission. Empirically, we show that the response of markup dispersion to monetary policy shocks can account for a significant fraction of the aggregate TFP response in the first two years after the shock. Analytically, we show that heterogeneous price rigidity can explain the response of markup dispersion if firms have a precautionary price setting motive, which is present in common New Keynesian environments. We provide empirical evidence in support of this explanation. Finally, we study the mechanism and its implications in a quantitative model.
We consider sorting in the labor market, that is, whether high- or low-productivity workers and firms tend to match with each other, and how this varies over time using U.S. linked employer–employee data. Composition changes of workers and firms move in opposite directions over the business cycle. During and after recessions, low-rank workers are less likely to work, while the employment share of low-rank firms increases. The agreement between worker and firm ranks increases in the early stages of labor market downturns.
We study optimal monetary and fiscal policies in a New Keynesian model with heterogeneous agents, incomplete markets, and nominal rigidities. Our approach uses small‐noise expansions and Fréchet derivatives to approximate equilibria quickly and efficiently. Responses of optimal policies to aggregate shocks differ qualitatively from what they would be in a corresponding representative agent economy and are an order of magnitude larger. A motive to provide insurance that arises from heterogeneity and incomplete markets outweighs price stabilization motives.
We study the role of financial frictions and firm heterogeneity in determining the investment channel of monetary policy. Empirically, we find that firms with low default risk—those with low debt burdens and high “distance to default”— are the most responsive to monetary shocks. We interpret these findings using a heterogeneous firm New Keynesian model with default risk. In our model, low‐risk firms are more responsive to monetary shocks because they face a flatter marginal cost curve for financing investment. The aggregate effect of monetary policy may therefore depend on the distribution of default risk, which varies over time.
We estimate the magnitudes of reduced earnings, work hours, and wage rates of workers displaced during the Great Recession using linked employer-employee panel data from Washington state. Displaced workers’ earnings losses occurred mainly because hourly wage rates dropped at the time of displacement and recovered sluggishly. Lost employer-specific premiums explain only 17 percent of these losses. Fully 70 percent of displaced workers moved to employers paying the same or higher wage premiums than the displacing employers, but these workers nevertheless suffered substantial wage rate losses. Loss of valuable specific worker-employer matches explains more than one-half of the wage losses. (JEL E32, J22, J31, J63, R23)
We use a massive, matched employer-employee database for the United States to analyze the contribution of firms to the rise in earnings inequality from 1978 to 2013. We find that one-third of the rise in the variance of (log) earnings occurred within firms, whereas two-thirds of the rise occurred due to a rise in the dispersion of average earnings between firms. However, this rising between-firm variance is not accounted for by the firms themselves but by a widening gap between firms in the composition of their workers. This compositional change can be split into two roughly equal parts: high-wage workers became increasingly likely to work in high-wage firms (i.e., sorting increased), and high-wage workers became increasingly likely to work with each other (i.e., segregation rose). In contrast, we do not find a rise in the variance of firm-specific pay once we control for the worker composition in firms. Finally, we find that two-thirds of the rise in the within-firm variance of earnings occurred within mega (10,000+ employee) firms, which saw a particularly large increase in the variance of earnings compared with smaller firms.
Central bank announcements simultaneously convey information about monetary policy and the central bank's assessment of the economic outlook. This paper disentangles these two components and studies their effect on the economy using a structural vector autoregression. It relies on the information inherent in high-frequency co-movement of interest rates and stock prices around policy announcements: a surprise policy tightening raises interest rates and reduces stock prices, while the complementary positive central bank information shock raises both. These two shocks have intuitive and very different effects on the economy. Ignoring the central bank information shocks biases the inference on monetary policy nonneutrality. (JEL D83, E43, E44, E52, E58, G14)
This paper evaluates the role of redistribution in the transmission mechanism of monetary policy to consumption. Three channels affect aggregate spending when winners and losers have different marginal propensities to consume: an earnings heterogeneity channel from unequal income gains, a Fisher channel from unexpected inflation, and an interest rate exposure channel from real interest rate changes. Sufficient statistics from Italian and US data suggest that all three channels are likely to amplify the effects of monetary policy. (JEL E21, E31, E43, E52)
We propose a framework to identify and estimate earnings distributions and worker composition on matched panel data, allowing for two‐sided worker‐firm unobserved heterogeneity and complementarities in earnings. We introduce two models: a static model that allows for nonlinear interactions between workers and firms, and a dynamic model that allows, in addition, for Markovian earnings dynamics and endogenous mobility. We show that this framework nests a number of structural models of wages and worker mobility. We establish identification in short panels, and develop tractable two‐step estimators where firms are classified in a first step. Applying our method to Swedish administrative data, we find that log‐earnings are approximately additive in worker and firm heterogeneity. Our estimates imply the presence of strong sorting patterns between workers and firms, and a small contribution of firms—net of worker composition—to earnings dispersion. In addition, we document that wages have a direct effect on mobility, and that, beyond their dependence on the current firm, earnings after a job move also depend on the previous employer.
A substantial fraction of workers are underemployed, i.e., employed in jobs for which they are overqualified, and that fraction-the underemployment rate-is higher in recessions. To explain these facts, we build a search model with an endogenous "ranking" mechanism, in which high- skill applicants are systematically hired over less- skilled competing applicants. Some high- skill workers become underemployed in order to escape the competition for high- skill jobs and find a job more rapidly at the expense of less- skilled workers. Quantitatively, the model can capture the key characteristics of underemployment, notably the fact that both the underemployment rate and the wage loss associated with becoming underemployed increase in recessions.
We revisit the transmission mechanism from monetary policy to household consumption in a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian (HANK) model. The model yields empirically realistic distributions of wealth and marginal propensities to consume because of two features: uninsurable income shocks and multiple assets with different degrees of liquidity and different returns. In this environment, the indirect effects of an unexpected cut in interest rates, which operate through a general equilibrium increase in labor demand, far outweigh direct effects such as intertemporal substitution. This finding is in stark contrast to small- and medium-scale Representative Agent New Keynesian (RANK) economies, where the substitution channel drives virtually all of the transmission from interest rates to consumption. Failure of Ricardian equivalence implies that, in HANK models, the fiscal reaction to the monetary expansion is a key determinant of the overall size of the macroeconomic response.
We study the effects of monetary policy shocks on—and their historical contribution to—consumption and income inequality in the United States since 1980 as measured by the Consumer Expenditure Survey. Contractionary monetary policy systematically increases inequality in labor earnings, total income, consumption and total expenditures. Furthermore, monetary policy shocks account for a non-trivial component of the historical cyclical variation in income and consumption inequality. Using detailed micro-level data on income and consumption, we document some of the different channels via which monetary policy shocks affect inequality, as well as how these channels depend on the nature of the change in monetary policy.
We show that after monetary policy announcements, the conditional volatility of stock market returns rises more for firms with stickier prices than for firms with more flexible prices. This differential reaction is economically large and strikingly robust to a broad array of checks. These results suggest that menu costs-broadly defined to include physical costs of price adjustment, informational frictions, etc.-are an important factor for nominal price rigidity at the micro level. We also show that our empirical results are qualitatively and, under plausible calibrations, quantitatively consistent with New Keynesian macroeconomic models in which firms have heterogeneous price stickiness.
We assess the empirical content of equilibrium models of labor market sorting based on unobserved (to economists) characteristics. In particular, we show theoretically that all parameters of the classic model of sorting based on absolute advantage in Becker, 1973 with search frictions can be nonparametrically identified using only matched employer–employee data on wages and labor market transitions. In particular, these data are sufficient to nonparametrically estimate the output of any individual worker with any given firm. Our identification proof is constructive and we provide computational algorithms that implement our identification strategy given the limitations of the available data sets. Finally, we add on-the-job search to the model, extend the identification strategy, and apply it to a large German matched employer–employee data set to describe detailed patterns of sorting and properties of the production function.
This chapter reviews and synthesizes our current understanding of the shocks that drive economic fluctuations. The chapter begins with an illustration of the problem of identifying macroeconomic shocks, followed by an overview of the many recent innovations for identifying shocks. It then reviews in detail three main types of shocks: monetary, fiscal, and technology. After surveying the literature, each section presents new estimates that compare and synthesize key parts of the literature. The penultimate section briefly summarizes a few additional shocks. The final section analyzes the extent to which the leading shock candidates can explain fluctuations in output and hours. It concludes that we are much closer to understanding the shocks that drive economic fluctuations than we were 20 years ago.
In recent years, central banks have increasingly turned to forward guidance as a central tool of monetary policy. Standard monetary models imply that far future forward guidance has huge effects on current outcomes, and these effects grow with the horizon of the forward guidance. We present a model in which the power of forward guidance is highly sensitive to the assumption of complete markets. When agents face uninsurable income risk and borrowing constraints, a precautionary savings effect tempers their responses to changes in future interest rates. As a consequence, forward guidance has substantially less power to stimulate the economy.
We document a negative correlation, at business cycle frequencies, between the net job creation rate of large employers and the level of aggregate unemployment that is much stronger than for small employers. The differential growth rate of employment between initially large and small employers has an unconditional correlation of -0.5 with the unemployment rate, and varies by about 5 percent over the business cycle. We exploit several datasets from the United States, Denmark, and France, both repeated cross sections and job flows with employer longitudinal information, spanning the last four decades and several business cycles. We discuss implications for theories of factor demand. (JEL D22, E23, E32, J23, L25)
(negative) sorting results if the match production function is supermodular (submodular). If the production function is modular, no sorting obtains. We propose an identification strategy that allows identification of not only the presence of sorting in matching, but also the type of sorting, negative or positive. Like Eeckhout and Kircher (2008) we find that the commonly used wage decomposition in Abowd, Kramarz, and Margolis (1999) does not in itself identify sorting, although the mechanisms that lead to lack of identification in our model differ from that of the partnership model studied in Eeckhout and Kircher (2008).
A dynamic stochastic model for a competitive industry is developed in which entry, exit, and the growth of firms' output and employment is determined. The paper extends long-run industry equilibrium theory to account for entry, exit, and heterogeneity in the size and growth rate of firms. Conditions under which there is entry and exit in the long run are developed. Cross sectional implications and distributions of profits and value of firms are derived. Comparative statics on the equilibrium size distribution and turnover rates are analyzed. Copyright 1992 by The Econometric Society.
Using a longitudinal sample of one million French workers and 500,000 employing firms, the authors decompose real total annual compensation per worker into components: observable employee characteristics, personal heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity, and residual. Unobserved personal heterogeneity is a very important source of wage variation. Unobserved firm heterogeneity, while important, is not as important as person effects. Enterprises that hire high-wage workers are more productive but not more profitable. Enterprises that pay higher wages, controlling for person effects, are more productive and more profitable. Person effects explain about 90 percent of interindustry and firm-size wage differences while firm effects explain substantially less.
Stochastic search equilibrium
- Moscarini