From Sick Man of Europe to Economic Superstar: Germany's Resurgent Economy

By Christian Dustmann, Bernd Fitzenberger, Uta Schönberg, and Alexandra Spitz-Oener

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

In the late 1990s and into the early 2000s, Germany was often called "the sick man of Europe." Indeed, Germany's economic growth averaged only about 1.2 percent per year from 1998 to 2005, including a recession in 2003, and unemployment rates rose from ...

Immigrants' Effect on Native Workers: New Analysis on Longitudinal Data

By Mette Foged and Giovanni Peri

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2016

Using longitudinal data on the universe of workers in Denmark during the period 1991-2008, we track the labor market outcomes of low-skilled natives in response to an exogenous inflow of low- skilled immigrants. We innovate on previous identification str...

Tax Policy and Economic Growth: Lessons from the 1980s

[Symposium: The Slowdown in Productivity Growth]

By Michael J. Boskin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1988

The past seven years of U.S. economic policy and performance constitute a truly remarkable, if confusing, experiment. Few would have guessed in 1980 that inflation would fall rapidly to 4 percent and hold pretty steady during a lengthy recovery; that prod...

The Effect of Public Insurance Coverage for Childless Adults on Labor Supply

By Laura Dague, Thomas DeLeire, and Lindsey Leininger

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2017

This study provides plausibly causal estimates of the effect of public insurance coverage on the employment of non-elderly, nondisabled adults without dependent children ("childless adults"). We take advantage of the sudden imposition of an enrollment cap...

Exclusive Goods and Formal-Sector Employment

By Reto Foellmi and Josef Zweimüller

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2011

We explore how the underemployment problem of less-developed economies is related to income inequality. Consumers have nonhomothetic preferences over differentiated products of formal-sector goods and thus inequality affects the composition of aggregate ...

Moving to Job Opportunities? The Effect of "Ban the Box" on the Composition of Cities

By Jennifer L. Doleac and Benjamin Hansen

American Economic Review, May 2017

Jurisdictions across the United States have adopted "ban the box" (BTB) policies preventing employers from conducting criminal background checks until late in the job application process. Their primary goal is to increase employment for those with crimina...

An Introduction to the Wage Curve

By David G. Blanchflower and Andrew J. Oswald

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1995

This paper documents a statistical regulatity or law. It shows that there exists a downward-sloping curve linking the level of a worker's pay to the unemployment rate in the worker's region. The same curve can be found in microeconomic data sets from sixt...

Labor Contracts, Equal Treatment, and Wage-Unemployment Dynamics

By Andy Snell and Jonathan P. Thomas

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2010

This paper analyses a model in which firms cannot pay discriminate based on year of entry. It is assumed that workers can costlessly quit at any time, while firms are committed to contracts. We solve for the dynamics of wages and unemployment, and show th...

Policy Watch: Proposals for Time-Limited Welfare

By Rebecca M. Blank

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1994

This paper summarizes the Clinton administration's welfare reform proposal and views the available evidence on the effects of time-limiting cash assistance and requiring work among long-term Aid to Families with Dependent Children users. The reforms are d...

Real Business Cycles: A New Keynesian Perspective

[Symposium: Real Business Cycles]

By N. Gregory Mankiw

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1989

Real business cycle theory is the latest incarnation of the classical view of economic fluctuations. It assumes that there are large random fluctuations in the rate of technological change. In response to these fluctuations, individuals rationally alter t...

Separations, Sorting, and Cyclical Unemployment

By Andreas I. Mueller

American Economic Review, July 2017

This paper establishes a new fact about the compositional changes in the pool of unemployed over the US business cycle. Using micro-data from the Current Population Survey for the years 1962-2012, it documents that in recessions the pool of unemployed shi...

Assessing the Incidence and Efficiency of a Prominent Place Based Policy

By Matias Busso, Jesse Gregory, and Patrick Kline

American Economic Review, April 2013

This paper empirically assesses the incidence and efficiency of Round I of the federal urban Empowerment Zone (EZ ) program using confidential microdata from the Decennial Census and the Longitudinal Business Database. Using rejected and future applica...

Back on the Rails: Competition and Productivity in State-Owned Industry

By Sanghamitra Das, Kala Krishna, Sergey Lychagin, and Rohini Somanathan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2013

We use a proprietary dataset on the floor-level operations at the largest rail mill in India to study the response of productivity to the threat of entry. Output per active shift increased by 28 percent over 3 years with minimal changes in physical cap...

Agriculture and the Transition to the Market

[Symposium: Economic Transition in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe]

By Karen Brooks, J. Luis Guasch, Avishay Braverman, and Csaba Csaki

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 1991

Agricultural sectors in Eastern and Central Europe are large, and a substantial number of people are directly affected by changes in producer prices, farm employment, and land ownership. Retail food markets are among the most distorted in the pre-transiti...

The Accelerated Benefits Demonstration: Impacts on the Employment of Disability Insurance Beneficiaries

By Michelle Stegman Bailey and Robert R. Weathers II

American Economic Review, May 2014

We use data from the Accelerated Benefits demonstration to estimate the impacts of providing newly entitled disability insurance (DI) beneficiaries with health insurance and additional services during the DI program's 24-month Medicare waiting period. Whi...

The Effect of Disability Insurance Payments on Beneficiaries' Earnings

By Alexander Gelber, Timothy J. Moore, and Alexander Strand

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

A crucial issue is whether social insurance affects work decisions through income or substitution effects. We examine this in the context of US Social Security Disability Insurance (DI), exploiting discontinuous changes in the benefit formula with a regre...

Evidence on Discrimination in Employment: Codes of Color, Codes of Gender

[Symposium: Discrimination in Product, Credit and Labor Markets]

By William A. Darity and Patrick L. Mason

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1998

There is substantial racial and gender disparity in the American economy. As we will demonstrate, discriminatory treatment within the labor market is a major cause of this inequality. Yet, there appear to have been particular periods in which racial minor...

Reflections on the Natural Rate Hypothesis

[Symposium: The Natural Rate of Unemployment]

By Joseph Stiglitz

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

Does the deviation of unemployment from some natural rate provide a robust and useful way to predict changes in the inflation rate? Can economists explain why the NAIRU changes over time? Is the NAIRU a useful way to frame policy discussions despite the u...

Optimal Life Cycle Unemployment Insurance

By Claudio Michelacci and Hernán Ruffo

American Economic Review, February 2015

We argue that US welfare would rise if unemployment insurance were increased for younger and decreased for older workers. This is because the young tend to lack the means to smooth consumption during unemployment and want jobs to accumulate high-return...

Internal Migration in the United States

By Raven Molloy, Christopher L. Smith, and Abigail Wozniak

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2011

This paper examines the history of internal migration in the United States since the 1980s. By most measures, internal migration in the United States is at a 30-year low. The widespread decline in migration rates across a large number of subpopulations su...