Roundup: Unconventional Monetary Policy, Gender Earnings Gap and COVID-19 Lockdown Responses

Today, we are highlighting some research the St. Louis Fed has recently produced that you may have missed.

Review

More Stories of Unconventional Monetary Policy

Central banks worldwide responded to the financial crisis of 2007-09 with a variety of measures, including unconventional monetary policy. This article, which extends earlier work focusing on 2008-12, reviews how central banks tailored their unconventional monetary methods to their various challenges and the structures of their respective economies from 2013 through 2019.

Understanding the Gender Earnings Gap: Hours Worked, Occupational Sorting, and Labor Market Experience

Research has shown that the gender earnings gap increases with age. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, this article looks at the role of occupations, hours worked and work experience accumulated with age in the observed gender earnings. It finds that differences in hours and labor market experience account for the majority of the gender earnings gap for college- and noncollege-educated workers.

Lockdown Responses to COVID-19

Why did some countries lock down their economies quickly and others took longer to make the decision? This article examines the relationship between countries’ lockdown responses to the pandemic and those countries’ political rights and civil liberties, macroeconomic variables, and vulnerability to the virus.

Working Paper

The Alpha Beta Gamma of the Labor Market

This paper breaks up the U.S. labor market into three types of workers (α’s, β’s and γ’s) based on patterns of employment transitions—how long workers typically remain at the same job and how quickly they can find a new job if they become unemployed. It finds that a relatively small number of the most unstable workers were responsible for the majority of the Great Recession’s rise in unemployment and its persistence.