Israel's Stabilization Program of 1985, or Some Simple Truths of Monetary Theory

By Don Patinkin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1993

Within a period of two months, and with minimal adverse effects on employment and the real functioning of the economy, Israel's 1985 stabilization program reduced the annual rate of inflation from close to 500 percent to less than 20 percent (correspondin...

The Cyclical Behavior of Equilibrium Unemployment and Vacancies

By Robert Shimer

American Economic Review, March 2005

This paper argues that the textbook search and matching model cannot generate the observed business-cycle-frequency fluctuations in unemployment and job vacancies in response to shocks of a plausible magnitude. In the United States, the standard deviation...

Vanishing Children: From High Unemployment to Low Fertility in Developed Countries

By Alicia Adsera

American Economic Review, May 2005

The Political Economy of Corporate Governance

By Marco Pagano and Paolo F. Volpin

American Economic Review, September 2005

We analyze the political determinants of investor and employment protection. Our model predicts that proportional electoral systems are conducive to weaker investor protection and stronger employment protection than majoritarian systems. This prediction i...

Return of the Solow Paradox? IT, Productivity, and Employment in US Manufacturing

By Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, and Brendan Price

American Economic Review, May 2014

An increasingly influential "technological-discontinuity" paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using US manufac...

The Impact of Affirmative Action Regulation and Equal Employment Law on Black Employment

[Symposium: The Economic Status of African-Americans]

By Jonathan S. Leonard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1990

Was affirmative action successful in increasing employment opportunities for blacks? In this paper, affirmative action will refer to the provisions of Lyndon Johnson's Executive Order 11246 in 1965, as amended by Richard Nixon's Executive Order 11375 [3 C...

The Labor Market Status of Black Americans: 1939-1985

[Symposium: The Economic Status of African-Americans]

By Gerald D. Jaynes

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1990

Among the empirical changes in the labor maket status of black Americans since 1939, three stand out: 1) three decades of rapid progress followed by two decades of relative stagnation in many aggregate measures of relative black earnings and incomes; 2) d...

Why Does the Economy Fall to Pieces after a Financial Crisis?

[Symposium: Macroeconomics after the Financial Crisis]

By Robert E. Hall

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2010

The worst financial crisis in the history of the United States and many other countries started in 1929. The Great Depression followed. The second-worst struck in the fall of 2008 and the Great Recession followed. Commentators have dwelt endlessly on the ...

Yours, Mine, and Ours: Do Divorce Laws Affect the Intertemporal Behavior of Married Couples?

By Alessandra Voena

American Economic Review, August 2015

This paper examines how divorce laws affect couples' intertemporal choices and well-being. Exploiting panel variation in US laws, I estimate the parameters of a model of household decision-making. Household survey data indicate that the introduction of un...

The Flow Approach to Labor Markets: New Data Sources and Micro-Macro Links

[Symposium: American Employment]

By Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman, and John Haltiwanger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2006

New data sources and products developed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census highlight the fluid character of U.S. labor markets. Private sector job creation and destruction rates average nearly 8 percent of employment per quarte...

The Long Slump

By Robert E. Hall

American Economic Review, April 2011

In a market-clearing economy, declines in demand from one sector do not cause large declines in aggregate output because other sectors expand. The key price mediating the response is the interest rate. A decline in the rate stimulates all categories of sp...

Kwacha Gonna Do? Experimental Evidence about Labor Supply in Rural Malawi

By Jessica Goldberg

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2016

I use a field experiment to estimate the wage elasticity of employment in the day labor market in rural Malawi. Once a week for 12 consecutive weeks, I make job offers for a workfare-type program to 529 adults. The daily wage varies from the tenth to the ...

What the Stock Market Decline Means for the Financial Security and Retirement Choices of the Near-Retirement Population

[Symposium: Retirement and Work Choices]

By Alan L. Gustman, Thomas L. Steinmeier, and Nahid Tabatabai

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2010

This paper investigates the effect of the current recession on the retirement age population. Data from the Health and Retirement Study suggest that those approaching retirement age (early boomers ages 53 to 58 in 2006) have only 15.2 percent of their wea...

Job Loss and the Fraying of the Implicit Employment Contract

[Symposium: Household Risks]

By Kevin F. Hallock

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2009

Most workers have one employment contract that is explicit and another one that is implicit. The explicit employment contract specifies working hours, compensation, and job tasks. The implicit contract involves expectations about the extent to which the e...

Does Mestizaje Matter in the US? Economic Stratification of Mexican Immigrants

By Alberto Dávila, Marie T. Mora, and Sue K. Stockly

American Economic Review, May 2011

Using data from the 2003 New Immigrant Survey, this paper examines whether stratification as reflected by skin shade exists among newly legalized Mexican immigrants in the US. While we do not find evidence that skin color directly related to employment pr...

In Honor of Kevin M. Murphy: Winner of the John Bates Clark Medal

By Finis Welch

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2000

Kevin M. Murphy is the winner of the 1998 John Bates Clark Medal, presented by the American Economic Association every second year to an outstanding economist under the age of forty who is selected for special recognition. He is the George Pratt Schultz P...

Relational Contracts and the Value of Loyalty

By Simon Board

American Economic Review, December 2011

This paper characterizes the optimal contract for a principal who repeatedly chooses among N potential agents under the threat of holdup. Over time, the principal would like to trade with different agents; however, the possibility of ex-post opportunism a...

Wages and Employment in a Random Social Network with Arbitrary Degree Distribution

By Yannis M. Ioannides and Adriaan R. Soetevent

American Economic Review, May 2006

Direct Democracy and Public Employees

By John G. Matsusaka

American Economic Review, December 2009

In the public sector, employment may be inefficiently high because of patronage, and wages may be inefficiently high because of public employee interest groups. This paper explores whether the initiative process, a direct democracy institution of growing ...

Specific Capital and Vintage Effects on the Dynamics of Unemployment and Vacancies

By Burcu Eyigungor

American Economic Review, June 2010

In a reasonably calibrated Mortensen and Pissarides matching model, shocks to average labor productivity can account for a small portion of the fluctuations in unemployment and vacancies (Shimer (2005)). I add heterogeneity in jobs (matches) with respect ...