Essays on Labor Markets, Monetary Policy, and Uncertainty

Essays on Labor Markets, Monetary Policy, and Uncertainty PDF Author: Neil Ware White (IV)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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This dissertation examines the impacts on the labor market of monetary policy and macroeconomic uncertainty. The first chapter examines how monetary policy shocks in the U.S. affect the flows of workers among three labor market categories--employment, unemployment, and non-participation--and assesses each flow's relative importance to changes in labor market "stock'' variables like the unemployment rate. I find that job loss accounts for the largest portion of monetary policy's effect on labor markets. I develop a New Keynesian model that incorporates these channels and show how a central bank can achieve welfare gains from targeting job loss, rather than output, in an otherwise standard Taylor rule. The second chapter examines the role of monetary policy in "job polarization.'' I argue that contractionary monetary policy has accelerated the decline of employment in routine occupations, which largely affected workers with a high-school degree but no college. In part by disproportionately affecting industries with high shares of routine occupations, contractionary monetary policy shocks lead to large and persistent shifts away from routine employment. Expansionary shocks, on the other hand, have little effect on these industries. Indeed, monetary policy's effect on overall employment is concentrated in routine jobs. These results highlight monetary policy's role in generating fluctuations not only in the level of employment, but also the composition of employment across occupations and industries. The third chapter introduces new direct measures of uncertainty derived from the Michigan Survey of Consumers. The series underlying these new measures are more strongly correlated with economic activity than many other series that are the basis for uncertainty proxies. The survey also facilitates comparison with response dispersion or disagreement, a commonly used proxy for uncertainty in the literature. Dispersion measures have low or negative correlation with direct measures of uncertainty and often have causal effects of opposite sign, suggesting that they are poor proxies for uncertainty. For the measures based on series most closely correlated with economic activity, positive uncertainty shocks are mildly expansionary. This result is robust across identification and estimation strategies and is consistent with "growth options'' theories of the effects of uncertainty.

Essays on Labor Markets, Monetary Policy, and Uncertainty

Essays on Labor Markets, Monetary Policy, and Uncertainty PDF Author: Neil Ware White (IV)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
This dissertation examines the impacts on the labor market of monetary policy and macroeconomic uncertainty. The first chapter examines how monetary policy shocks in the U.S. affect the flows of workers among three labor market categories--employment, unemployment, and non-participation--and assesses each flow's relative importance to changes in labor market "stock'' variables like the unemployment rate. I find that job loss accounts for the largest portion of monetary policy's effect on labor markets. I develop a New Keynesian model that incorporates these channels and show how a central bank can achieve welfare gains from targeting job loss, rather than output, in an otherwise standard Taylor rule. The second chapter examines the role of monetary policy in "job polarization.'' I argue that contractionary monetary policy has accelerated the decline of employment in routine occupations, which largely affected workers with a high-school degree but no college. In part by disproportionately affecting industries with high shares of routine occupations, contractionary monetary policy shocks lead to large and persistent shifts away from routine employment. Expansionary shocks, on the other hand, have little effect on these industries. Indeed, monetary policy's effect on overall employment is concentrated in routine jobs. These results highlight monetary policy's role in generating fluctuations not only in the level of employment, but also the composition of employment across occupations and industries. The third chapter introduces new direct measures of uncertainty derived from the Michigan Survey of Consumers. The series underlying these new measures are more strongly correlated with economic activity than many other series that are the basis for uncertainty proxies. The survey also facilitates comparison with response dispersion or disagreement, a commonly used proxy for uncertainty in the literature. Dispersion measures have low or negative correlation with direct measures of uncertainty and often have causal effects of opposite sign, suggesting that they are poor proxies for uncertainty. For the measures based on series most closely correlated with economic activity, positive uncertainty shocks are mildly expansionary. This result is robust across identification and estimation strategies and is consistent with "growth options'' theories of the effects of uncertainty.

Essays on Labor Market Rigidities, Inflation Persistence and Monetary Policy Uncertainty

Essays on Labor Market Rigidities, Inflation Persistence and Monetary Policy Uncertainty PDF Author: Pau Rabanal
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 342

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Essays on labor markets and monetary policy

Essays on labor markets and monetary policy PDF Author: Tong Wang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : de
Pages : 81

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Essays on Macroeconomic Implications of Financial and Labor Markets and Political Processes

Essays on Macroeconomic Implications of Financial and Labor Markets and Political Processes PDF Author: Karl Brunner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economic policy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Essays in Labor Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics

Essays in Labor Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics PDF Author: Daniele Caratelli
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This dissertation explores three questions in macroeconomics: two pertaining to labor macroeconomics and one concerning monetary economics. In the first chapter, I study the role wealth plays in workers' labor market outcomes and, in turn, how it impacts their earnings prospects over the business cycle. In the second chapter (joint with Basil Halperin) we investigate the optimal monetary policy in an sectoral economy with menu costs and find that the central bank should target constant nominal wages and not constant prices, as is typically prescribed. In the third and final chapter (joint with Aniket Baksy) we show that increased educational attainment played an important role in the decline in worker mobility in the US over the past three decades. This contrast with the existing literature, which attributes the decline to lower economic dynamism.

Essays in Monetary Policy

Essays in Monetary Policy PDF Author: Gaoyan Tang
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
This dissertation presents three chapters addressing issues pertaining to monetary policy, information, and central bank communication. The first chapter studies optimal monetary policy in an environment where policy actions provide a signal of economic fundamentals to imperfectly informed agents. I derive the optimal discretionary policy in closed form and show that, in contrast to the perfect information case, the signaling channel leads the policymaker to be tougher on inflation. The strength of the signaling effect of policy depends on relative uncertainty levels. As the signaling effect strengthens, the optimal policy under discretion approaches that under commitment to a forward-looking linear rule, thereby decreasing the stabilization bias. This contributes to the central bank finding it optimal to withhold its additional information from private agents. Under a general linear policy rule, inflation and output forecasts can respond positively to a positive interest rate surprise when the signaling channel is strong. This positive response is the opposite of what standard perfect information New Keynesian models predict and it matches empirical patterns found by previous studies. Chapter 2 provides new empirical evidence supporting the predictions of the model presented in Chapter 1. More specifically, I find that the responses of inflation forecasts to interest rate surprises is especially positive when there is greater uncertainty regarding the previous forecast. Finally, Chapter 3 examines whether communications by the Federal Open Market Committee might have the ability to influence financial market responses to macroeconomic news. In particular, I am able to relate labor-related word use in FOMC statements and meeting minutes to the amount by which interest rates' response to labor-related news exceeds their response to other news.

Essays on Labor Market Search, Business Cycles and Monetary Policy

Essays on Labor Market Search, Business Cycles and Monetary Policy PDF Author: Antonella Trigari
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Labour Markets and Uncertainty

Labour Markets and Uncertainty PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Labor contract
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Three Essays on Labor Market Volatility, Monetary Policy and Real Wage Stickiness

Three Essays on Labor Market Volatility, Monetary Policy and Real Wage Stickiness PDF Author: Pierrick Clerc
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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The starting point of this PhD dissertation is related to the Shimer puzzle, i.e. the unability of the search and matching model to reproduce the high volatility of the unemployment rate. Real wage rigidities were considered as the main solution to this puzzle. Nevertheless, Sveen and Weinke (2008) argue that those rigidities would not have any impact on the unemployment volatility when hours per worker are determined by the firms. In the first chapter, we argue that the capacity of real wage rigidities to solve the puzzle critically depends on the way that rigidities are introduced. When real wage stickiness results from the «credible bargaining» (Hall and Milgrom ,2008), we show that the unemployment volatility is magnified, even for hours being firms' decisions. A significant stabilization trade-off between inflation and unemployment is moreover restituted. However, we stress in the second chapter that the credible bargaining delivers a moderate degree of wage rigidity and then requires unrealistic values for some parameters to completely replicate the unemployment volatility. We integrate asymmetric information into this framework and show that the resulting higher wage stickiness fully reproduces the volatility for a plausible calibration. ln the last chapter, we emphasize that it is possible to solve the puzzle without resting on real wage stickiness, by considering a particular calibration of the model with endogenous separations. We also highlight a central mechanism of this framework, for which the volatility of the separation rate amplifies that of the job finding rate.

The Great Inflation

The Great Inflation PDF Author: Michael D. Bordo
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226066959
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 545

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Book Description
Controlling inflation is among the most important objectives of economic policy. By maintaining price stability, policy makers are able to reduce uncertainty, improve price-monitoring mechanisms, and facilitate more efficient planning and allocation of resources, thereby raising productivity. This volume focuses on understanding the causes of the Great Inflation of the 1970s and ’80s, which saw rising inflation in many nations, and which propelled interest rates across the developing world into the double digits. In the decades since, the immediate cause of the period’s rise in inflation has been the subject of considerable debate. Among the areas of contention are the role of monetary policy in driving inflation and the implications this had both for policy design and for evaluating the performance of those who set the policy. Here, contributors map monetary policy from the 1960s to the present, shedding light on the ways in which the lessons of the Great Inflation were absorbed and applied to today’s global and increasingly complex economic environment.