Arlene Wong
Princeton University

Trading Down and the Business Cycle (joint w/Nir Jaimovich & Sergio Rebelo)

We document two facts. First, during the Great Recession, consumers traded down in the quality of the goods and services they consumed. Second, the production of low-quality goods is less labor intensive than that of high-quality goods.  When households traded down, labor demand fell, increasing the severity of the recession. We find that the trading-down phenomenon accounts for a substantial fraction of the fall in U.S. employment in the recent recession. We show that embedding quality choice in a business-cycle model improves the model's amplification and comovement properties.