Collaborative Research: Macroeconomic Implications of Rising Wage Inequality in the United States

在过去的30年里，美国的工资不平等现象急剧增加。这一趋势引发了大量的研究，试图找出其原因，并伴随着关于一个更加不平等的社会的后果的激烈的公开辩论。然而，经济学家仍然没有很好地理解工资不平等加剧对宏观经济的影响。例如，消费和工作时间方面的不平等在近几十年来只略有增加，这或许令人惊讶。该项目的目标是对美国经济中工资不平等加剧的宏观经济和福利影响进行全面的定量评估。该项目将为四个不同但严格相关的问题提供定量答案。首先，工资结构的变化在多大程度上可以解释美国工作时间、收入、消费和财富的横截面离散动态？其次，技能溢价的上升加上工资的不稳定性增加，能否解释最近壮年男性不参与的激增？第三，女性劳动力参与率的上升、性别工资差距的缩小和家庭内部保险对于理解不平等的动态有多重要？最后，在金融和保险市场不完善的情况下，美国家庭不可保劳动力市场风险上升的福利成本是多少？该项目的所有这些组成部分都有一个共同的方法，可概括为两个阶段。首先，面板数据统计技术被用来提供一个准确的经验评估的变化，在个人（或联合家庭）的工资随机过程。接下来，随时间变化的工资过程被用来作为输入到校准的代际不完全市场模型经济，以产生，通过数值模拟，预测的变量的兴趣。因此，我们的方法结合了对工资动态变化的严格计量经济学分析（劳动经济学的典型）与最先进的定量理论（典型的宏观经济学），以隔离工资不平等加剧对家庭层面的消费、储蓄、劳动力供应以及最终福利分配的影响。了解这些问题可以帮助经济学家和政策制定者决定他们应该在多大程度上关注横截面不平等的趋势和波动，而不是更传统的总体经济增长和商业周期波动。此外，通过研究共同决定大量经济变量的分散程度的机制，我们的研究提出了政策干预的方向，以减轻工资不平等加剧对社会的成本。

There has been a dramatic increase in wage inequality in the United States over the past thirty years. This trend has generated a vast amount of research attempting to identify its causes, and has been accompanied by a vibrant public debate on the consequences of a more unequal society. However, the effects of rising wage inequality for the macroeconomy are still not very well understood by economists. For example, inequality in consumption and hours worked has, perhaps surprisingly, increased only modestly in recent decades. The goal of this proposal is to provide a comprehensive quantitative assessment of the macroeconomic and welfare implications of rising wage inequality for the U.S. economy.The project will provide a quantitative answer to four distinct, but strictly interrelated questions. First, to what extent can changes in the wage structure account for the observed dynamics of cross-sectional dispersion in hours worked, earnings, consumption, and wealth in the United States? Second, can a rising skill-premium coupled with greater wage instability explain the recent surge in non-participation among prime-aged males? Third, how important for understanding the dynamics of inequality are the rise in female labor-force participation, the narrowing of the gender wage gap, and intra-family insurance? Finally, what are the welfare costs of the observed rise in uninsurable labor market risk for U.S. households, given incomplete financial and insurance markets?All these components of the project share a common methodology, which can be summarized in two stages. First, panel-data statistical techniques are used to provide an accurate empirical assessment of the changes in the individual (or joint family) stochastic process for wages. Next, the time-varying wage process is used as an input into calibrated overlapping-generations incomplete-markets model economies in order to generate, through numerical simulations, predictions for the variables of interest. Our approach therefore combines a rigorous econometric analysis of changing wage dynamics (typical of labor economics) with state-of-the-art quantitative theory (typical of macroeconomics) in order to isolate the effects of rising wage inequality on the distribution at the household level of consumption, savings, labor supply and, ultimately, welfare.Broader Impacts: Understanding these issues can help economists and policy-makers decide how much attention they should pay to trends and fluctuations in cross-sectional inequality relative to the more traditional concerns of aggregate economic growth and business-cycle fluctuations. Moreover, by examining the mechanisms via which the level of dispersion in a large set of economic variables is jointly determined, our study suggests directions in which policy interventions should be targeted in order to mitigate the costs of rising wage inequality on society.