Okun Revisited: Who Benefits Most from a Strong Economy

Stephanie Aaronson, Mary Daly, William Wascher and David Wilcox

No 2019-072, Finance and Economics Discussion Series from Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (U.S.)

Abstract: Previous research has shown that the labor market experiences of less advantaged groups are more cyclically sensitive than the labor market experiences of more advantaged groups; in other words, less advantaged groups experience a high-beta version of the aggregate fluctuations in the labor market. For example, when the unemployment rate of whites increases by 1 percentage point, the unemployment rates of African Americans and Hispanics rise by well more than 1 percentage point, on average. This behavior is observed across other labor-market indicators, and is roughly reversed when the unemployment rate declines. We update this work to include the post-Great Recession period and extend the analysis to consider whether these high-beta relationships change when the labor market is especially tight. We find suggestive evidence that when the labor market is already strong, a further increment of strengthening provides a modest extra benefit to some disadvantaged groups, relative to earlier in the labor-market cycle. In addition, we provide preliminary evidence suggesting that these gains are somewhat persistent for African Americans and women.

Keywords: Business Cycles; Inequality; Labor supply and demand; Racial Disparities; Unemployment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 80 pages
Date: 2019-09-24
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mac
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

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Journal Article: Okun Revisited: Who Benefits Most from a Strong Economy? (2019)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedgfe:2019-72

DOI: 10.17016/FEDS.2019.072

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