57 research outputs found
Not your father's pension plan: the rise of 401K and other defined contribution plans
No full textThe number of workers with a 401(k) plan grew from 7.1 million in 1983 to 38.9 million by 1993. The rapid diffusion of 401(k) and other portable defined contribution plans and the decline in defined benefit pensions represent a major change in pension structure. Old-style defined benefit pensions were designed to give a fixed income after retirement, but only for workers who stayed in a job for 20 or 30 years; workers who left early ended up with little or nothing. Resulting changes in portability, access to pension wealth, and riskiness are altering incentives for job tenure and worker mobility, retirement, and saving both before and after retirement.Pensions ; Retirement
Explaining the Evolution of Pension Structure and Job Tenure
No full textCurrent and expected job tenure have fallen significantly over the last two decades. Over the same period, traditional defined benefit pensions, designed to reward long tenure, have become steadily less common. This paper uses a contract-theoretic matching model with moral hazard to explain changes in pension structure and job tenure. In our model, a decline in the value of existing jobs relative to new jobs reduces expected match duration and thus the appeal of DB pensions. We show that this explanation is consistent with observed trends and suggests an additional consequence of technological change that has not been closely studied.
Discordant City Employment Cycles
No full textThe national economy is often described as having a business cycle over which aggregate output enters and exits distinct expansion and recession phases. Analogously, national employment cycles in and out of its own expansion and contraction phases, which are closely related to the business cycle. This paper estimates city-level employment cycles for 58 large U.S. cities and documents the substantial cross-city variation in the timing, lengths, and frequencies of their employment contractions. It also shows how the spread of city-level contractions associated with U.S. recessions has tended to follow recession-specific geographic patterns. In addition, cities within the same state or region have tended to have similar employment cycles. There is no evidence, however, that similarities in employment cycles are related to similarities in industry mix. This suggests that the U.S. employment and business cycles has a spatial dimension that is independent of broad industry-level fluctuations.
Business cycle phases in U.S. states
No full textThe U.S. aggregate business cycle is often characterized as a series of distinct recession and expansion phases. We apply a regime-switching model to state-level coincident indexes to characterize state business cycles in this way. We find that states differ a great deal in the levels of growth that they experience in the two phases: Recession growth rates are related to industry mix, whereas expansion growth rates are related to education and age composition. Further, states differ significantly in the timing of switches between regimes, indicating large differences in the extent to which state business cycle phases are in concord with those of the aggregate economy.Business cycles ; Regional economics
Does Prestroke Antiplatelet Therapy Increase the Risk of Symptomatic Intracranial Hemorrhage in Patients Receiving Tissue Plasminogen Activator for Acute Ischemic Stroke?
No full textAn alternative definition of economic regions in the U.S. based on similarities in state business cycles
No full textSince the 1950s the Bureau of Economic analysis (BEA) has grouped the states into eight regions based primarily on cross-sectional similarities in their socioeconomic characteristics. This is the most frequently used grouping of states in the U.S. for economic analysis. Since several recent studies concentrate on similarities and differences in regional business cycles, this paper groups states into regions based not on a broad set of socioeconomic characteristics but on the similarities in their business cycles. The analysis makes use of a consistent set of coincident indexes estimated from a Stock and Watson-type model. The author applies k-means cluster analysis to the cyclical components of these indexes to group the 48 contiguous states into eight regions with similar cycles. Having grouped the states into regions, the author determines the relative strength of cohesion among the states in the various regions. Finally, the author compares the regions defined in this paper with the BEA regions.Business cycles ; Regional economics
Cycles inside cycles: Spanish regional aggregation
No full textThis paper sets out a comprehensive framework to identify regional business cycles within Spain and analyses their stylised features and the degree of synchronization present among them and the Spanish economy. We show that the regional cycles are quite heterogeneous although they display some degree of synchronization that can be partially explained using macroeconomic variables. We also propose a dynamic factor model to cluster the regional comovements and Önd out if the country cycle is simply the aggregation of the regional ones. We Önd that the Spanish business cycle is not shared by the seventeen regions, but is the sum of the di§erent regional behaviours. The implications derived from our results are useful both for policy makers and analysts.
Abstract Sun708: The impact of intra-arrest TEE on epinephrine administration in in-hospital cardiac arrest: A resuscitative TEE collaborative registry (rTEECoRe) study
No full textcleared with the author or authors. Differences in Subprime Loan Pricing Across Races and Neighborhoods ˚
No full textThe views expressed are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect official positions of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the Federal Reserve System, or the Board of Governors. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Working Papers are preliminary materials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment. References in publications to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Working Papers (other than an acknowledgment that the writer has had access to unpublished material) should b
Multivariate out-of-sample tests for Granger causality.
No full textA time series is said to Granger cause another series if it has incremental predictive power when forecasting it. While Granger causality tests have been studied extensively in the univariate setting, much less is known for the multivariate case. In this paper we propose multivariate out-of-sample tests for Granger causality. The performance of the out-of-sample tests is measured by a simulation study and graphically represented by Size-Power plots. It emerges that the multivariate regression test is the most powerful among the considered possibilities. As a real data application, we investigate whether the consumer confidence index Granger causes retail sales in Germany, France, the Netherlands and Belgium.Consumer Sentiment, Granger Causality, Multivariate Time Series,Out-of-sample TestsBelgium; Consumer confidence; Consumer Confidence Index; Consumer sentiment; Data; Forecasting; Germany; Granger causality; Indexes; Multivariate time series; Out-of-sample tests; Performance; Power; Regression; Research; Sales; Simulation; Studies; Tests; Time; Time series;
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