Nezih Guner

 

Director and Professor of Economics at CEMFI

ICREA Research Professor (on leave)

 

                E-mail: nezih.guner[AT]cemfi.es

 

Publications           CV

 


 

Labor Market Institutions and Fertility (with Ezgi Kaya and Virginia Sánchez Marcos),  forthcoming, International Economic Review

 

Among high-income countries, fertility rates differ significantly, with some experiencing total fertility rates as low as 1 to 1.3 children per woman. However, the reasons behind low fertility rates are not well understood. We show that uncertainty created by dual labor markets, the coexistence of temporary and open-ended contracts, and the inflexibility of work schedules are crucial to understanding low fertility. Using rich administrative data from the Spanish Social Security records, we document that temporary contracts are associated with a lower probability of first birth. With Time Use data, we also show that women with children are less likely to work in jobs with split-shift schedules. Such jobs have a long break in the middle of the day, and present a concrete example of inflexible work arrangements and fixed time cost of work. We then build a life-cycle model in which married women decide whether to work, how many children to have, and when to have them. Reforms that eliminate duality or split-shift schedules increase women's labor force participation and reduce the employment gap between mothers and non-mothers. They also increase fertility for women who are employed. Reforming these labor market institutions and providing childcare subsidies would increase the completed fertility of married women to 1.8 children.

 

The Role of Friends in the Opioid Epidemic (with Effrosyni Adamopoulou, Jeremy Greenwood and Karen Kopecky), January 2024. NBER WP 32032. New!

 

The role of friends in the US opioid epidemic is examined. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health), adults aged 25-34 and their high school best friends are focused on. An instrumental variable technique is employed to estimate peer effects in opioid misuse. Severe injuries in the previous year are used as an instrument for opioid misuse in order to estimate the causal impact of someone misusing opioids on the probability that their best friends also misuse. The estimated peer effects are significant: Having a best friend with a reported serious injury in the previous year increases the probability of own opioid misuse by around 7 percentage points in a population where 17 percent ever misuses opioids. The effect is driven by individuals without a college degree and those who live in the same county as their best friends.

 

Peter Coy, NYtimes

 

Demographic Transitions across Time and Space (with Matthew J. Delventhal and Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde), January 2024. New Version!

 

The demographic transition - the move from a high fertility/high mortality regime into a low fertility/low mortality regime - is one of the most fundamental transformations that countries undertake. To study demographic transitions across time and space, we compile a data set of birth and death rates for 186 countries spanning more than 250 years. We document that (i) a demographic transition has been completed or is ongoing in nearly every country; (ii) the speed of transition has increased over time; and (iii) having more neighbors that have started the transition is associated with a higher probability of a country beginning its own transition. To account for these observations, we build a quantitative model in which parents choose child quantity and educational quality. Countries differ in geographic location, and improved production and medical technologies diffuse outward from Great Britain, the technological leader. Our framework replicates well the timing and increasing speed of transitions. It also produces a strong correlation between the speeds of fertility transition and increases in schooling similar to the one in the data.

 

Check the interactive webpage where you can access our data on demographic transtions HERE!

 

Segregation and Sorting of U.S. Households: Who Marries Whom and Where? (with Davide Alonzo and Claudio Luccioletti and ), November 2023.

 

We use a spatial heterogeneous agent model of family formation to study the role of geography in shaping trends in marriage and inequality in the US. The United States has undergone dramatic shifts in household and family structures since the 1980s. Married female labor force participation increased significantly, marriage has declined, and positive assortative mating has risen. Along with a rising skill premium and a declining gender gap, income inequality among households has also widened. We document that these changes had an important geographic dimension: the decline in marriage was much more significant in smaller cities, and marital sorting declined in smaller cities but increased in larger ones. We interpret these facts within a model where households decide where to live, whether or not to get married, and with whom. The framework allows us to quantify the importance of each channel in shaping trends in marriage and inequality.

 

 

Rethinking the Welfare State (with Remzi Kaygusuz and Gustavo Ventura), November 2023, Econometrica.

 

The U.S. spends non trivially on non-medical transfers for its working-age population in a wide range of programs that support low and middle-income households. How valuable are these programs for U.S. households? Are there simpler, welfare-improving ways to transfer resources that are supported by a majority? What are the macroeconomic effects of such alternatives? We answer these questions in an equilibrium, life-cycle model with single and married households who face idiosyncratic productivity risk, in the presence of costly children and potential skill losses of females associated with non-participation. Our findings show that a potential revenue-neutral elimination of the welfare state generates large welfare losses in the aggregate, although most households support the move as losses are concentrated among a small group. We find that a Universal Basic Income program does not improve upon the current system. If instead per-person transfers are implemented alongside a proportional tax, a Negative Income Tax experiment, it becomes feasible to improve upon the current system. Providing per-person transfers to all households is costly, and reducing tax distortions helps providing for resources to expand redistribution. 

 

Video of Pierre Werner Chair Lecture by Nezih Guner, 17 March 2021

 

Slides

 

 

Labor Market Power and Development (with Tristany Armangué-Jubert and Alessandro Ruggieri), October 2023.

 

Imperfect competition in labor markets can lead to efficiency losses and lower aggregate output. In this paper, we study whether differences in competitiveness of labor markets can help explain differences in GDP per capita across countries. We structurally estimate a model of oligopsony with free entry for countries at different stages of development and show that the labor supply elasticity, which determines the extent of firms' labor market power, is increasing with GDP per capita. Wage mark-downs range from 55 percent among low-income countries to around 23 percent among the richest. Output per capita in poorer countries would increase by up to 69 percent if their labor markets were as competitive as in countries at the top of the development ladder.

 

The Looming Fiscal Reckoning: Tax Distortions, Top Earners, and Revenues (with Martin Lopez-Daneri and Gustavo Ventura), October 2023. Special Issue in Memory of Tom Cooley, Review of Economic Dynamics

 

How should the U.S. confront the growing revenue needs driven by higher spending requirements? We investigate the mix of potential tax increases that generate a given revenue need at the minimum welfare cost and evaluate its macroeconomic impact. We do so in the context of a life-cycle growth model that captures key aspects of the earnings and wealth distributions and the non-linear shape of taxes and transfers in place.  Our findings show that a proportional consumption tax combined with a lump-sum transfer to all households and a reduction in income tax progressivity consistently emerges as the best alternative to minimize welfare costs associated with a given increase in revenue. A 30% long-run increase in Federal tax revenue requires a consumption tax rate of 27.8%, a transfer of about 12% of mean household income to all households, and a reduction of top marginal income tax rates of more than 5 percentage points---output declines by 7.9% in the long run. While transfers are substantial, smaller transfers can accomplish most of the reduction in welfare costs. We find no role for wealth taxes in increasing revenues or minimizing welfare costs.

 

                               Slides

 

Misallocation and Inequality (with Alessandro Ruggieri), May 2023. R&R American Ecoomc Journal: Macroeconomics

 

We document how inequality in wage and salary earnings varies with GDP per capita for a large set of countries. The mean-to-median ratio and the Gini coefficient decline as we move from poorer to richer countries. Yet, this decline masks divergent patterns: while inequality at the top of the earnings distribution falls, inequality at the bottom increases. We interpret these facts within a model economy with heterogeneous workers and firms, featuring industry dynamics, search frictions, and skill accumulation of workers through on-the-job learning and training. The benchmark economy is calibrated to the UK. We then study how the earnings distribution changes with distortions that penalize high-productivity firms and frictions that reduce match formation.  Distortions and frictions reduce employment, average firm size, and GDP per capita. They also affect how much firms are willing to pay workers, how well high-skill workers are matched with high-productivity firms, and how much training workers receive. The model generates the observed cross-country relation between GDP per capita and earnings inequality and a host of cross-country facts on firm size distribution, firms' training decisions, and workers' life-cycle and job tenure earnings profiles.

 

The  Downward Spiral (with Jeremy Greenwood and Karen Kopecky), February 2022.

 

Abstract There have been more than 500,000 opioid overdose deaths since 2000. To analyze the opioid epidemic, a model is constructed where individuals choose whether to use opioids recreationally, knowing the probabilities of addiction and dying. These odds are functions of recreational opioid usage. Markov chains are estimated from the US data for the college and non-college educated that summarize the transitions into and out of opioid addiction as well as to a deadly overdose. The structural model is constructed to match the estimated Markov chains. The epidemic's drivers and the impact of medical interventions are examined.

 

 

Incarceration, Unemployment, and the Racial Marriage Divide (Elizabeth Caucutt  and Christopher Rauh), November 2021. R&R Review of Economic Studies

The difference in marriage rates between black and white Americans is striking. Wilson (1987) suggests that a skewed sex ratio and higher rates of incarceration and unemployment are responsible for lower marriage rates among the black population. In this paper, we take a dynamic look at the Wilson Hypothesis. Incarceration rates and labor market prospects of black men make them riskier spouses than white men. We develop an equilibrium search model of marriage, divorce, and labor supply in which transitions between employment, unemployment, and prison differ by race, education, and gender. The model also allows for racial differences in how individuals value marriage and divorce. We estimate the model and investigate how much of the racial divide in marriage is due to the Wilson Hypothesis and how much is due to differences in preferences for marriage. We find that the Wilson Hypothesis accounts for more than three quarters of the model's racial-marriage gap. This suggests policies that improve employment opportunities and/or reduce incarceration for black men could shrink the racial-marriage gap.

 

Read BSE Focus Feature on this article,  Read the VOXEU feature on this article

 

Does the Added Worker Effect Matter?  (with Yuliya Kulikova and Arnau Valladares-Esteban), March 2021, R&R, Review of Economic Dynamics

 

The added worker effect (AWE) measures the entry of individuals into the labor force due to their partners' adverse labor market outcomes. We propose a new method to calculate the AWE that allows us to estimate its effect on any labor market outcome. The AWE reduces the fraction of households with two non-employed members by 16% for the 1977-2018 period; 28% in the 1990 recession and 23% during the great recession. The AWE also accounts for why women's employment is much less cyclical and more symmetric than men's. Without the AWE, married women's employment would be as volatile as men and display negative skewness (declining quickly in recessions and recovering slowly in expansions). In recessions, while some women lose their employment, others enter the labor market and find jobs. This keeps female employment relatively stable.

 

Optimal Spatial Taxation: Are Big Cities Too Small? (with Jan Eeckhout), R&R Journal of European Economic Association

 

Read Barcelona GSE Focus feature on this article

 

We analyze the role of optimal income taxation across different local labor markets. Should labor in large cities be taxed differently than in small cities? We find that a planner who needs to raise a given level of revenue and is constrained by free mobility of labor across cities does not choose equal taxes for cities of different sizes. The optimal tax schedule is location specific and tax differences between large and small cities depends on the level of government spending, the concentration of housing wealth and the strength of agglomeration economies. Our estimates for the US imply higher optimal marginal rates in big cities than in small cites. Under the current Federal Income tax code with progressive taxes, marginal rates are already higher in big cities which have higher wages, but the optimal difference we estimate is lower than what is currently observed. Simulating the US economy under the optimal tax schedule, there are large effects on population mobility: the fraction of population in the 5 largest cities grows by 7.6% with 3.4% of the country-wide population moving to bigger cities. The welfare gains however are smaller. This is due to the fact that much of the output gains are spent on the increased costs of housing construction in bigger cities. Aggregate goods consumption goes up by 1.51% while aggregate housing consumption goes down by 1.70%.