Federal Reserve System

About: Federal Reserve System is a other organization based out in Washington D.C., District of Columbia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Inflation. The organization has 2373 authors who have published 10301 publications receiving 511979 citations.

Job-Hopping in Silicon Valley: Some Evidence Concerning the Microfoundations of a High-Technology Cluster

Abstract: Observers of Silicon Valley's computer cluster report that employees move rapidly between competing firms, but evidence supporting this claim is scarce. Job-hopping is important in computer clusters because it facilitates the reallocation of talent and resources toward firms with superior innovations. Using new data on labor mobility, we find higher rates of job-hopping for college-educated men in Silicon Valley's computer industry than in computer clusters located out of the state. Mobility rates in other California computer clusters are similar to Silicon Valley's, suggesting some role for features of California law that make noncompete agreements unenforceable. Consistent with our model of innovation, mobility rates outside computer industries are no higher in California than elsewhere.

ABCs (and Ds) of Understanding VARs

Abstract: The dynamics of a linear (or linearized) dynamic stochastic economic model can be expressed in terms of matrices (A, B, C, D) that define a state space system for a vector of observables. An associated state space system (A,ˆB,C,ˆD) determines a vector autoregression for those same observables. We present a simple condition for checking when these two state space systems match up and when they do not when there are equal numbers of economic and VAR shocks. We illustrate our condition with a permanent income example. (JEL C32, E32)

“Distribution-free” estimates of efficiency in the U.S. banking industry and tests of the standard distributional assumptions

Abstract: Studies of efficiency in banking and elsewhere often impose arbitrary assumptions on the distributions of efficiency and random error in order to separate one from the other. In this study, we impose much less structure on these distributions and only assume that efficiencies are stable over time while random error tends to average out. We are able to do so by estimating firm-specific effects on costs using panel data sets of over 28,000 observations on U.S. banks from 1980 to 1989. We find results similar to the literature—X-efficiencies or managerial differences in efficiency are important in banking, while scale-efficiency differences are not. However, we also find that the distributional assumptions usually imposed in the literature are not very consistent with these data.