Results for “kudlyak”

7 found

In an interesting new paper Federal Reserve economists Marianna Kudlyak, Murat Tasci and Didem Tüzemen look at what happens to job vacancy postings when the minimum wage increases.

The vacancy data in our analysis come from the job openings data from the Conference Board as a part of its Help Wanted OnLine (HWOL) data series. HWOL provides monthly data on vacancies at detailed geographical (state, metropolitan statistical area, and county) and occupational (six-digit SOC and eight-digit O*Net) levels starting from May 2005. HWOL covers around 16,000 online job boards.

…Our identification strategy exploits the idea that different occupations can be differently impacted by minimum wage hikes due to differential mass of occupation-specific wage distributions concentrated around the prevailing minimum wage. We formalize this idea by analyzing wage distributions by occupation at the state level using micro data from the Current Population Survey (CPS). We identify occupations with large shares of employed workers at or near the state-level effective minimum wage and we refer to these occupations as “at-risk occupations.” We then estimate vacancy growth in at-risk occupations relative to vacancy growth in other occupations around the time when minimum wage increase takes place in the state, and relative to growth in vacancies in at-risk occupations at the national level.

…We find a statistically significant and economically sizeable negative effect of the minimum wage increase on vacancies. Specifically, a 10 percent increase in the level of the effective minimum wage reduces the stock of vacancies in at-risk occupations by 2.4 percent and reduces the flow of vacancies in at-risk occupations by about 2.2 percent.

…We find that firms cut vacancies up to three quarters in advance of the actual minimum wage increase. This finding is consistent with the firms’ desire to cut employment and vacancies being a forward-looking tool to achieve it. This finding is also consistent with a typical announcement effect of a policy change. Formally testing for the parallel trends assumption in our triple-difference identification, we find that at-risk and not-at-risk occupations do not have statistically significant differences in their vacancy trends prior to the typical announcement period. But the negative effect persists even four quarters after the minimum wage increase. The cumulative negative effect of a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage on total vacancies is as large as 4.5 percent a year later.

…We find that vacancies in occupations that typically employ workers with lower educational attainment (high school or less) are affected more negatively than vacancies in other occupations. The negative effect on vacancy posting is exacerbated in counties with higher poverty rates, which highlights another trade-off that policymakers might want to take into account.

This reminded me of a similar paper on rent controls (ungated) by Are Oust that Tyler and I mention in the forthcoming edition of Modern Principles of Economics.

Are Oust studied rent controls in Oslo, Norway and found that during the rent control era it was common for landlords to require their tenants to be of a certain gender, age, occupation and even religion (which would be illegal in the United States). Landlords would also find ways to charge extra by asking renters for extra services such as baby-sitting, garden work or snow-clearing. When rent control was eliminated, however, the number of apartments increased and landlords no longer advertised these kinds of requirements. Perhaps most telling, in the rent-control era it was common for renters to advertise “Apartment Wanted” but when rent controls were lifted it became much more common for landlords to advertise “Apartments for Rent!”

In other words, in a free market firms search for employees and landlords search for renters but under the minimum wage and rent control, workers must search for jobs and renters must search for apartments to a much greater extent.

Because of real factors, in a nutshell:

Using the recession recovery point equal to the month when private payrolls first exceeded their previous peak level, this paper argues that it was the negative secular trend in manufacturing jobs that was the most important determinant of the length and depth of the last three recessions/recoveries. This negative secular trend changed the layoff/recall pattern of jobs in manufacturing into permanent displacements, a malady that lengthened the recovery periods and that is not the explicit target of either traditional monetary policy or traditional fiscal policy. Using the ideas gathered from an examination of the US two-digit sectoral data for the US overall, attention turns to the recession/recoveries of the 50 US states in the last three national recession periods. Regressions that explain the lengths and depths of the recessions in 50 US states reveal the importance of construction jobs, but the most important predictor was manufacturing jobs: the greater the share of manufacturing jobs prior to the recession, the worse was the recession/recovery.

That is a new NBER working paper by Ed Leamer.  This of course bears on current monetary policy debates.  A very firmly held view on Twitter is that our post-2012 (or so) recovery could have been quicker, had the Fed been more aggressive, and thus we cannot afford to make the same mistake again.  Yet after a certain point it was real factors responsible for the recovery problems, and this new Leamer paper shows that (money still should be have been looser earlier on, in my view).  See also my previous coverage of papers by Marianna Kudylak (and co-authors), and Bob Hall directs my attention to this recent paper on why employment right now is recovering as fast as it is.  The evidence really is piling up very rapidly and decisively that mainly real factors are/were the problem after a certain point.

Here is a recent paper by Andreas Hornstein and Marianna Kudlyak, noting that when the authors write “current” they are (were) referring to pre-Covid times:

Current unemployment, as of 2019Q4, is so low not because of unusually high job finding rates out of unemployment, but because of unusually low entry rates into unemployment. The unusually low entry rates, both from employment and from out of the labor force, reflect a long-run downward trend, and have lowered the unemployment rate trend over the recent decade. In fact, the difference between the current unemployment rate and unemployment rates at the two previous cyclical peaks in 2000 and 2007 is more than fully accounted for by the decline in its trend. This suggests that the current low unemployment rate does not indicate a labor market that is tighter than in 2000 or 2007.

Of course these results have significance for the common view that we need to “run the labor market hot” to get back to a desirable state of affairs.  What we need is for the necessary adjustments to take place to restore a new and sustainable equilibrium.