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

在过去的三十年里，美国的工资不平等现象急剧加剧。这一趋势产生了大量试图找出其原因的研究，并伴随着一场关于更不平等社会后果的激烈公众辩论。然而，不断扩大的工资不平等对宏观经济的影响，经济学家们仍然没有很好地理解。例如，近几十年来，消费和工作时间的不平等程度仅略有增加，这或许令人惊讶。本提案的目标是对美国经济中工资不平等加剧对宏观经济和福利的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在美国观察到的工作时间、收入、消费和财富的横断面分散动态？其次，不断上升的技能溢价加上更大的工资不稳定性，能否解释壮年男性近期不参加工作的人数激增？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理解不平等的动态有多重要？最后，考虑到不完善的金融和保险市场，美国家庭无法投保的劳动力市场风险上升的福利成本是什么？项目的所有这些组成部分共享一个共同的方法，可以分为两个阶段。首先，面板数据统计技术用于提供个人（或联合家庭）工资随机过程变化的准确经验评估。接下来，随时间变化的工资过程被用作校准的重叠代不完全市场模型经济的输入，以便通过数值模拟对感兴趣的变量进行预测。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（典型的劳动经济学）和最先进的定量理论（典型的宏观经济学），以隔离工资不平等加剧对家庭消费、储蓄、劳动力供应以及最终福利分配的影响。更广泛的影响：了解这些问题可以帮助经济学家和政策制定者决定，相对于总体经济增长和商业周期波动等更传统的问题，他们应该对横断面不平等的趋势和波动给予多大的关注。此外，通过研究一大批经济变量的分散水平共同决定的机制，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给社会带来的成本。

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.