美联储-劳动力市场歧视与种族失业差距：货币政策能有所作为吗？（英）-2023.10-英-64页_672kb

Labor Market Discrimination and Monetary Policy's Impact on Racial Unemployment Gap

Summary

This paper analyzes racial disparities in unemployment, particularly between Black and white workers, using a New Keynesian search and matching model with endogenous separations and employer taste-based discrimination. It evaluates how a switch from a "Deviations" monetary policy framework to a "Shortfalls" rule affects these disparities.

Key Findings

• Labor Market Discrimination: Employer discrimination against Black workers explains much of the persistent racial unemployment gap, which is largely unexplained by observable characteristics. The model generates countercyclical discrimination measures.

• Monetary Policy Effects:

  • Switching to a Shortfalls rule reduces the racial unemployment gap and labor market discrimination but increases average inflation.
  • The policy benefits disadvantaged groups more during economic expansions but does not significantly reduce welfare inequality in the model.

• Welfare: Despite narrower employment gaps, welfare gains are quantitatively small, indicating limited impact on reducing overall racial inequality through monetary policy.

Conclusion

The study shows that while the Shortfalls policy has distributional benefits for reducing racial unemployment disparities, its effects on welfare and inflation highlight trade-offs. Further research incorporating additional model complexities could provide deeper insights into policy implications.