Black Americans face higher cyclical unemployment risk than white Americans: job-finding rates during recessions are lower and the risk of becoming long-term unemployed is higher. Differences in unemployment risk across Black and white Americans imply that Black Americans optimally invest less...

Spatial differences in labor market performance are large and highly persistent. Using data from the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, we document striking similarities in spatial differences in unemployment, vacancies, job finding, and job filling within each country. This robust...

The COVID19 crisis has hit labor markets. School and child-care closures have put families with children in challenging situations. We look at Germany and quantify the macroeconomic importance of working parents. We document that 26 percent of the German work force have children aged 14 or...

This paper studies the secular increase in U.S. household debt and its relation to growing income inequality and financial fragility. We exploit a new household-level dataset that covers the joint distributions of debt, income, and wealth in the United States over the past seven decades. The...

This paper aims at an improved understanding of the relationship between monetary policy and racial inequality. We investigate the distributional effects of monetary policy in a unified framework, linking monetary policy shocks both to earnings and wealth differentials between black and white...

The production processes at many firms rely on a highly choreographed and interdependent network of workers performing specialized jobs. We designed and implemented a targeted employer survey to measure the extent of coordination in work processes. We link this firm-level coordination measure to...

The racial wealth gap is the largest of the economic disparities between Black and white Americans, with a white-to-Black per capita wealth ratio of 6 to 1. It is also among the most persistent. In this paper, we construct the first continuous series on white-to-Black per capita wealth ratios...

Job levels summarize the complexity, autonomy, and responsibility of task execution. Conceptually, job levels are related to the organization of production, are distinct from occupations, and can be constructed from data on task execution. We highlight their empirical role in matched...

Houses are the most important asset on American households' balance sheets, rendering the U.S. economy sensitive to house prices. There is a consensus that credit conditions affect house prices, but to what extent remains controversial, as an expansion in credit supply often coincides with...

This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the macroeconomic, distributional, and fiscal effects of three reform proposals for Germany: i) a reduction in the social security tax in the low-wage sector, ii) a publicly financed expansion of full-day child care and full-day schooling, and...