Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/iie/pbrief/pb22-7.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Bad news for the Fed from the Beveridge space

Author

Listed:
  • Olivier J Blanchard

    (Peterson Institute for International Economics)

  • Alex Domash

    (Harvard University)

  • Lawrence H. Summers

    (Harvard University)

Abstract

The Federal Reserve seeks to cool an overheated US labor market to ease wage hikes and reduce job vacancies, without a painful spike in unemployment. But empirical evidence indicates that these goals have never been accomplished together and remain unlikely now. In fact, fighting inflation will require a reduction in job vacancies and also an increase in unemployment. The inverse relationship between job vacancies and unemployment is measured by the Beveridge curve, named after a British economist. Blanchard, Domash, and Summers find that the Fed's hope that vacancies can be decreased without increasing unemployment flies in the face of historical empirical evidence. The current low unemployment rate and the very high vacancy-to-unemployment ratio suggest that the labor market is overheating and the natural unemployment rate has increased. It has increased about 1.3 percentage points from its pre-COVID level, implying the labor market is even more overheated than suggested by the current unemployment rate.

Suggested Citation

  • Olivier J Blanchard & Alex Domash & Lawrence H. Summers, 2022. "Bad news for the Fed from the Beveridge space," Policy Briefs PB22-7, Peterson Institute for International Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:iie:pbrief:pb22-7
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.piie.com/publications/policy-briefs/bad-news-fed-beveridge-space
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:iie:pbrief:pb22-7. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Peterson Institute webmaster (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/iieeeus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.