We quantify the contribution of changes to the structure of the U.S. labor market to wage stagnation over the past 40 years. Using a rich structural model of wage and employment dynamics estimated on Current Population Survey data, we reach three main conclusions. First, upward job mobility has declined by half between the 1980s and 2010s. Second, this decline is not driven by weaker aggregate labor demand. Instead, we identify three key structural forces: increased mismatch between job openings and job seekers, rising employer concentration that limits job shopping opportunities, and reduced job search among the employed—potentially due to the growing use of non-compete agreements. Third, by curbing upward mobility, these structural shifts have lowered aggregate real wage growth by four percentage points since the 1980s, corresponding to approximately 40 percent of the decline of the aggregate labor share.

Why has worker mobility in the United States declined so much over the past decades? While previous work attributes this decline to reduced labor market dynamism, this paper reveals that one third of this decline is due to increased educational attainment among workers. Higher education affects labor mobility in two ways. First, having a larger share of young workers in school rather than in the labor market precludes these very workers, who are typically the most mobile, from switching jobs and occupations. Second, education provides workers an alternative to learning about their ''type'' making educated workers less reliant on experimenting with new jobs.

We analytically characterize optimal monetary policy in a multisector economy with menu costs and contrast it with the textbook New Keynesian model based on Calvo pricing. Following a sectoral productivity shock, the textbook model prescribes zero inflation, providing a formal justification for inflation targeting. In contrast, under menu costs, policy should ``look through'' sectoral shocks and allow inflation to move inversely with output. We provide sharp intuition for this result: stabilizing inflation causes shocks to spill over across sectors, forcing firms to adjust unnecessarily. Finally, in a quantitative model, moving from inflation targeting towards optimal policy improves welfare by 0.32%.

I study how wealth impacts workers' job-switching behavior and earnings through a precautionary job-keeping motive. All else equal, low-wealth workers are less willing to switch jobs because such moves increase their short-term risk of job loss. I quantify this channel using a search and matching model where wages are determined by a generalized alternating offer bargaining protocol that accommodates risk aversion, wealth accumulation, and on-the-job search. Precautionary job-keeping accounts for 43% of the earnings gap between low- and high-wealth workers after the Great Recession. The pandemic stimulus weakened this motive, fueling the strong recovery in job-switching in the United States.

Data, data, data… Economists know their importance well, especially when it comes to monitoring macroeconomic conditions - the basis for making informed economic and policy decisions. Handling large and complex data sets was a challenge that macroeconomists engaged in real-time analysis faced long before so-called big data became pervasive in other disciplines. We review how methods for tracking economic conditions using big data have evolved over time and explain how econometric techniques have advanced to mimic and automate best practices of forecasters on trading desks, at central banks, and in other market-monitoring roles. We present in detail the methodology underlying the New York Fed Staff Nowcast, which employs these innovative techniques to produce early estimates of GDP growth, synthesizing a wide range of macroeconomic data as they become available.