Does Monetary Policy Affect Relative Educational Unemployment Rates?
研究货币政策对按教育程度划分的相对失业率的影响，发现货币政策冲击会改变相对失业率，结果支持高压经济假说，即经济繁荣时低技能者就业改善更多。
This paper examines the empirical relationship between relative educational unemployment rates and monetary policy. Such an examination is warranted because policymakers’ attempts to understand the distributional effects of monetary policy may be confounded by vintages of the theoretical literature that offer contrasting views of how skill-based relative unemployment (with unemployment of the less skilled in the numerator) might behave over the business cycle. A traditional view emphasizes characteristics of labor markets that could induce countercyclical movements in skill-based relative unemployment. For example, Arthur Okun (1973) argues that an important benefit of high levels of aggregate economic activity is that opportunities for employment in the high-quality jobs sector open up to the relatively unskilled. A mechanism for the relative improvement of the employment prospects of the unskilled is changes in hiring standards of high-quality job providers that occur over the cycle. Changes that occur during expansion and boom periods mentioned by Okun include accepting younger and less experienced workers or workers without diplomas and more intensive screening of applicants. A forceful statement of this highpressure economy view is contained in Rebecca Blank (2000). A more recent view of the impact of technological adoption could have quite different implications for movements in skill-based relative unemployment over the cycle. For example, Dale Mortensen and Christopher Pissarides (1999) show that, in their equilibrium search and matching framework, the relationship between skill and unemployment is convex in the presence of labor-market policies such as unemployment compensation. In this environment, skill-biased technology shocks increase overall unemployment rates with a disproportionate share of the unemployment falling on the unskilled. In his popular account of the matter, Krueger (2002) ties cyclical investment in new technologies to the conduct of monetary policy, thereby linking relative educational unemployment to monetary policy. My answer to the title question emerges from quantitative results designed to assess the dynamic effect on relative educational unemployment of a monetary policy surprise, controlling for supply shocks and the introduction of new technical ideas. These findings appear to resolve some of the tension between alternative views on relative unemployment dynamics in favor of the high-pressure economy hypothesis. † Discussants: Seth B. Carpenter, Federal Reserve Board; Jonah B. Gelbach, University of Maryland; Bridget Terry Long, Harvard University.