家庭债务、劳动份额和收入不平等

Federal Reserve Board, Washington, D.C.ISSN 1936-2854 (Print)ISSN 2767-3898 (Online) Household debt, the Labor Share and Earnings Inequality Mark Robinson, Pedro Silos, Diego Vilan 2025-028 NOTE: Staff working papers in the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (FEDS) are preliminarymaterials circulated to stimulate discussion and critical comment.The analysis and conclusions set forthare those of the authors and do not indicate concurrence by other members of the research staff or theBoard of Governors. References in publications to the Finance and Economics Discussion Series (other thanacknowledgement) should be cleared with the author(s) to protect the tentative character of these papers. Household Debt, the Labor Share, and EarningsInequality‗ Mark Robinson†Pedro Silos‡Diego Vilán§ Abstract We show that the secular decline in real interest rates in the United States, which beganin the early 1980s and persisted for nearly four decades, reduced the labor’s share ofoutput and the unemployment rate, and increased earnings inequality. We establishthis link using a model of frictional labor markets, estimated from household-level data,in which unemployment risk is only partially insurable. Rising debt resulting fromlower interest rates reduces the value of unemployment, leading to lower equilibriumwages relative to productivity and a lower unemployment rate.Wage dispersionalso rises. The model is consistent with panel-data reduced-form evidence linkingunemployment duration, assets, debt, and post-unemployment wages. In the model,a decline in the real interest rate of the magnitude observed in the data generates adecline in the labor’s share of 6 percentage points and in the unemployment rate of 0.3percentage points. The variance of log earnings rises from 0.66 to 0.75. 1Introduction Starting in the early 1980s and continuing through the 2010s, real interest rates dropped inthe United States and much of the developed world. Researchers have pointed to variousreasons for this decline, including rising savings rates from East Asia, lower investmentdemand, and demographic changes.Regardless of the exact causes, this drop in realinterest rates caused a rise in household debt, both in unsecured forms like credit cardsand in secured forms like mortgages. This paper explores how the secular rise in debt hasimpacted labor markets, showing that falling real interest rates contributed to a decline inlabor’s share of output, a lower unemployment rate, and greater earnings inequality. The key premise is that higher debt (or fewer savings) makes being unemployedless sustainable.This occurs because unemployment risk is only partially insurable:unemployment benefits run out after a certain period, and savings or borrowing can onlycover expenses for so long. As households took on more debt in response to falling realinterest rates, their financial situations weakened, leaving them more financially vulnerable,and forcing them to accept lower wages to exit unemployment. We formalize this ideausing a standard job search model with a financial market, where households can saveor borrow (up to a point) at a fixed real interest rate. Workers can become unemployedwith some exogenous separation probability, but their job-finding probability depends onhouseholds’ balance sheets. Unemployment benefits act as a form of insurance but expireafter a set period, requiring unemployed workers to rely on their savings — or to borrowfurther if they are already in debt — to cover expenses. The rise in debt as a result of thedecline in real interest rates, lowers the value of unemployment relative to employment. Asa result, the rise in debt causes a decline in the unemployment rate and lowers the labor’sshare because workers must accept lower wages relative to their productivity. Finally, therise in debt also increases earnings (wage) inequality. The intuition is that as the marginalutility of consumption rises (low assets) the value of workers’ alternative to employment drops proportionately more at low wages. In other words, the reservation wage policy isconcave in assets. In the model, the labor market is segmented by skill to be consistentwith the evidence that the labor market experiences are different for different groups ofworkers (see Gregory et al. (2024)): some workers face higher separation rates with shortemployment spells and other workers are virtually shielded from labor market shocks. Wemap this heterogeneity to observed levels of education. Workers of different educationlevels face disparate labor market experiences affecting their wealth accumulation. Forinstance, asset-to-income ratios are significantly higher for higher-skilled workers. To motivate the structural model we use the Survey of Income and Program Participation(SIPP) in 2017 through 2019 to estimate reduced-form relationships between labor marketvariables and households’ balance sheets. Taking advantage of the high-frequency paneldimension, we link un