Publications

Publications

FRBSF Economic Letters

Economic analysis for a general audience

Evgeniya A. Duzhak

2021-25

Racial disparities in socioeconomic outcomes for the U.S. population are often masked by aggregate statistics. Unemployment rates vary significantly across groups according to gender and race or ethnicity and have different sensitivities to the business cycle. Focusing on jobless rates by demographic groups shows that Black and Hispanic workers, particularly men, are the most sensitive to periods of economic growth and decline. This higher sensitivity persists across individuals with the same education level. Occupation plays a role in explaining the relative cyclical differences in unemployment rates across demographic groups.

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FedViews

Analysis of current economic developments and the outlook

Western Economic Developments

Western Economic Developments is linked to via Fed in Print only.

Working Papers

The latest in economic research

Ding Dong, Zheng Liu, and Pengfei Wang

Recessions are associated with sharp increases in turbulence that reshuffles firms' productivity rankings. To study the business cycle implications of turbulence shocks, we use Compustat data to construct a measure of turbulence based on the (inverse of) Spearman correlations of firms' productivity rankings between adjacent years. We document evidence that turbulence rises in recessions, reallocating labor and capital from high-to low-productivity firms and reducing aggregate TFP and the stock market value of firms. A real business cycle model with heterogeneous firms and financial frictions can generate the observed macroeconomic and reallocation effects of turbulence. In the model, increased turbulence makes high-productivity firms less likely to remain productive, reducing their expected equity values and tightening their borrowing constraints relative to low-productivity firms. Thus, labor and capital are reallocated to low-productivity firms, reducing aggregate TFP and generating a recession with synchronized declines in aggregate output, consumption, investment, and labor hours, in line with empirical evidence.

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