For a two-week $300 payday advance loan, payday lenders typically charge in excess of $45, a cost so high that many believe the loan could not possibly be in the best interest of the borrower. Nevertheless, some estimates indicate that payday loan volume grew more than fivefold to almost $50 billion from the late 1990s to the mid 2000s (Stegman 2007). With the recent rise of the payday lending industry, questions abound about the characteristics and circumstances of payday loan borrowers, and the ultimate impact of such loans on their welfare. Interest in payday lending has grown among...

To date the debate over payday lending has focused on whether access to such lending is on net beneficial or harmful to consumer welfare. However, payday loans are not one product but many, and different forms of lending may have different welfare implications. The current diversity in payday lending stems from the diverse ways in which states have regulated the industry. This paper attempts to quantify the effects that various regulatory approaches have had on lending terms and usage. Using a novel institutional dataset of over 56 million payday loans, covering 26 states for nearly 6 years,...

In 2011 and 2012, the Federal Reserve sold Treasury securities from the short end of the yield curve at the same time it was providing market participants with date-specific assurances that overnight interest rates would not rise. We investigate how these two policies, which had conflicting pricing pressures, were absorbed by the market. We analyze the impacts of sales on the volume and composition of inventories of the Federal Reserve's counterparties, and examine how announcements of accommodative monetary policy affected spreads and prices across maturities. Our results suggest that these...

Young firms disproportionately employ young workers, controlling for firm size, industry, geography and time. The same positive correlation between young firms and young employees holds when we look just at new hires. On average, young employees in young firms earn higher wages than young employees in older firms. Further, young employees disproportionately join young firms with greater innovation potential and that exhibit higher growth, conditional on survival. These facts are consistent with the argument that the skills, risk tolerance, and career dynamics of young workers are contributing...

This study shows that a firm's reliance on skilled labor is an underlying determinant of its exposure to aggregate volatility risk. I present a model in which firms make hiring and firing decisions in an environment of time-varying aggregate volatility, and face linear adjustment costs that increase with the skill of a worker. In the model, an increase in aggregate volatility slows a firm's labor demand reaction to changes in economic conditions, reducing its ability to smooth cash flows. The rise in aggregate volatility has a more pronounced impact on firms with a high share of skilled labor...

Unemployment insurance experience rating imposes higher payroll tax rates on firms that have laid off more workers in the past. To analyze the effects of UI tax policy on labor market dynamics, this paper develops a search model of unemployment with heterogeneous firms and realistic UI financing. The model predicts that higher experience rating reduces both job creation and job destruction. Using firm- level data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, the model is tested by comparing job creation and job destruction across states and industries with different UI tax schedules. The...

We derive estimates of trend inflation for fourteen advanced economies from a framework in which trend shocks exhibit stochastic volatility. The estimated specification allows for timevariation in the degree to which longer-term inflation expectations are well anchored in each economy. Our results bring out the effect of changes in monetary regime (such as the adoption of inflation targeting in several countries) on the behavior of trend inflation. Our estimates expand on the previous literature in several dimensions: For each country, we employ a multivariate approach that pools different...

In recent years, the Federal Reserve has made substantial changes to its framework for monetary policymaking by providing greater clarity regarding its objectives, its intentions regarding the use of monetary policy- including nontraditional policy tools such as forward guidance and asset purchases-in the pursuit of those objectives, and its broader policy strategy. These changes reflected both a response to changes in economists' understanding of the most effective way to implement monetary policy and a response to specific challenges posed by the financial crisis and its aftermath,...

This book explores trends in inequality and poverty using both market and after-tax and transfer income in the period during and after the Great Recession (through 2011). Using market income (or wages), inequality and poverty rose sharply between 2008 and 2010. The primary exception is measures for the top of the distribution; annual wage and income shares of the top one percent dipped in 2008 and 2009. Including taxes and transfers, broad-based inequality measures also fell, and the poverty increase was muted. Tax and transfer policies lowered inequality and poverty, but those policies were...

This paper considers the design of monetary policy under uncertainty. Specifically, we use a simple model to jointly consider three things: learning by the monetary authority; model misspecification; and robust policies to counter the misspecification problems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to simultaneously consider these crucial elements of real-world policy design.