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Recent empirical evidence suggests that job polarization associated with skill-biased technological change accelerated during the Great Recession. We use a standard neoclassical growth framework to analyze how business cycle fluctuations interact with the long-run transition towards a skill-intensive technology. In the model, since adopting the new technology disrupts production, firms prefer to do so in recessions, when profits are low. Similarly, workers also tend to learn new skills during downturns. As a result, recessions are deeper during periods of technological transition, but they also speed up adoption of the new technology. We document evidence for these mechanisms in the data. Our calibrated model is able to match both the long-run downward trend in routine employment and the dramatic impact of the Great Recession. We also show that even in the absence of the Great Recession the routine employment share would have reached the observed level by the year 2012.

Zonder onderwerpscode: economie

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Recreation prices and hours worked have both fallen over the last century. We construct a macroeconomic model with general preferences that allows for trending recreation prices, wages, and work hours along a balanced-growth path. Estimating the model using aggregate data from OECD countries, we find that the fall in recreation prices can explain a large fraction of the decline in hours. We also use our model to show that the diverging prices of the recreation bundles consumed by different demographic groups can account for much of the increase in leisure inequality observed in the United States over the last decades.

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We study how heterogeneity in banks' asset holdings affects fragility. In the model, banks face a risk of bank runs and have to liquidate long-term assets in a common market to repay runners. Liquidation prices are depressed when many banks sell their assets at the same time. When banks are homogeneous, their selling behaviors are synchronized, and bank runs are exacerbated. We show that differentiating banks to some extent enhances the stability of all banks, even those whose asset performance ends up being weaker. Our analyses provide new insights about the regulation of banking sector's architecture and the design of government support during crises.