The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women's Employment, Education, and Family

By Claudia Goldin

American Economic Review, May 2006

Fiscal Externalities and Optimal Unemployment Insurance

By Nicholas Lawson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2017

A common finding of the optimal unemployment insurance (UI) literature is that the optimal replacement rate is around 50 percent; however, a key assumption is that UI is the only government spending activity. I show that optimal UI levels may be dramatica...

The Surprisingly Swift Decline of US Manufacturing Employment

By Justin R. Pierce and Peter K. Schott

American Economic Review, July 2016

This paper links the sharp drop in US manufacturing employment after 2000 to a change in US trade policy that eliminated potential tariff increases on Chinese imports. Industries more exposed to the change experience greater employment loss, increased imp...

Leaving Poverty Behind? The Effects of Generous Income Support Paired with Activation

By Simen Markussen and Knut Røed

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2016

We evaluate a comprehensive activation program in Norway targeted at hard-to-employ social assistance claimants with reduced work capacity. The program offers a combination of tailored rehabilitation, training, and job practice, and a generous, stable, an...

Retrospectives: The Economics of Leon Hirsch Keyserling

By W. Robert Brazelton

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1997

The economics of Leon H. Keyserling influenced the Roosevelt era in terms of housing, agriculture, labor, and antitrust legislation. During the Truman era, discussed herein, Keyserling was influential as chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, stressin...

Labor Market Rigidities: At the Root of Unemployment in Europe

[Symposium: European Unemployment]

By Horst Siebert

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1997

This paper studies the major institutional changes at the root of the increase in the west European unemployment trade in the last quarter century from below 3 percent to 11 percent. The institutional characteristics of wage bargaining and the legal rules...

Cash for Corollas: When Stimulus Reduces Spending

By Mark Hoekstra, Steven L. Puller, and Jeremy West

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2017

The 2009 Cash for Clunkers program aimed to stimulate consumer spending in the new automobile industry, which experienced disproportionate reductions in demand and employment during the Great Recession. Exploiting program eligibility criteria in a regress...

The Productivity Slowdown, the Oil Shocks, and the Real Cycle

[Symposium: The Slowdown in Productivity Growth]

By Mancur Olson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

Five facts stand out about economic performance in the United States since World War II. The first is that, for most of the postwar period, the U.S. has had a slower rate of economic growth than the other major developed democracies except Great Britain, ...

The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States

By David H. Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson

American Economic Review, October 2013

We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on US local labor markets, exploiting cross- market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization and instrumenting for US imp...

Creative Destruction and Subjective Well-Being

By Philippe Aghion, Ufuk Akcigit, Angus Deaton, and Alexandra Roulet

American Economic Review, December 2016

In this paper we analyze the relationship between turnover-driven growth and subjective well-being. Our model of innovation-led growth and unemployment predicts that: (i) the effect of creative destruction on expected individual welfare should be unambigu...

Incarceration Length, Employment, and Earnings

By Jeffrey R. Kling

American Economic Review, June 2006

This paper estimates effects of increases in incarceration length on employment and earnings prospects of individuals after their release from prison. I utilize a variety of research designs including controlling for observable factors and using instrumen...

The Fundamental Surplus

By Lars Ljungqvist and Thomas J. Sargent

American Economic Review, September 2017

To generate big responses of unemployment to productivity changes, researchers have reconfigured matching models in various ways: by elevating the utility of leisure, by making wages sticky, by assuming alternating-offer wage bargaining, by introducing co...

Unemployment in an Interdependent World

By Gabriel J. Felbermayr, Mario Larch, and Wolfgang Lechthaler

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2013

How do changes in labor market institutions, like more generous unemployment benefits in one country, affect labor market outcomes in other countries? We set up a two-country Armingtonian trade model with frictions on the goods and labor markets. Contr...

Identifying and Spurring High-Growth Entrepreneurship: Experimental Evidence from a Business Plan Competition

By David McKenzie

American Economic Review, August 2017

Almost all firms in developing countries have fewer than ten workers, with a modal size of one. Are there potential high-growth entrepreneurs, and can public policy help identify them and facilitate their growth? A large-scale national business plan compe...

Does State Fiscal Relief during Recessions Increase Employment? Evidence from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act

By Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Laura Feiveson, Zachary Liscow, and William Gui Woolston

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2012

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 included $88 billion of aid to state governments administered through the Medicaid reimbursement process. We examine the effect of these transfers on states' employment. Because state fiscal relief...

Informal Employment in a Growing and Globalizing Low-Income Country

By Brian McCaig and Nina Pavcnik

American Economic Review, May 2015

We document several facts about workforce transitions from the informal to the formal sector in Vietnam, a fast growing, industrializing, and low-income country. First, younger workers, particularly migrants, are more likely to work in the formal sector a...

Subsidizing Vocational Training for Disadvantaged Youth in Colombia: Evidence from a Randomized Trial

By Orazio Attanasio, Adriana Kugler, and Costas Meghir

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2011

This paper evaluates the impact of a randomized training program for disadvantaged youth introduced in Colombia in 2005. This randomized trial offers a unique opportunity to examine the impact of training in a middle income country. We use originally coll...

A Context-Robust Measure of the Disincentive Cost of Unemployment Insurance

By Johannes F. Schmieder and Till von Wachter

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper proposes a new measure of the disincentive cost of unemployment insurance (UI): the ratio of the behavioral cost (BC) to the mechanical cost (MC) of a UI reform. This measure represents the labor supply distortion relative to the additional (me...

Slum Clearance and Urban Renewal in the United States

By William J. Collins and Katharine L. Shester

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

We study the local effects of a federal program that helped cities clear areas for redevelopment, rehabilitate structures, complete city plans, and enforce building codes. We use an instrumental variable strategy to estimate the program's effects on ci...

The For-Profit Postsecondary School Sector: Nimble Critters or Agile Predators?

[Symposium: Higher Education]

By David J. Deming, Claudia Goldin, and Lawrence F. Katz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2012

Private for-profit institutions have been the fastest-growing part of the U.S. higher education sector. For-profit enrollment increased from 0.2 percent to 9.1 percent of total enrollment in degree-granting schools from 1970 to 2009, and for-profit insti...