Equity in Unemployment Insurance Benefit Access

By Christopher J. O'Leary, William E. Spriggs, and Stephen A. Wandner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We investigate the uneven pattern of access to unemployment insurance (UI) by age, gender, race, and ethnicity across the United States. We present results from a descriptive analysis using publicly available data reported by states over time on rates of ...

Unemployment Insurance Financing as a Uniform Payroll Tax

By Sebastian Graves, Jonathon Hazell, Walker F. Lewis, and Christina Patterson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In the United States, unemployment insurance (UI) is financed by taxes levied on employers. We develop a model to decompose UI taxes into a firing tax component levied on firms that lay off workers, and a uniform payroll tax component levied on all firms ...

Poor Performance as a Predictable Outcome: Financing the Administration of Unemployment Insurance

By Marta Lachowska, Alexandre Mas, and Stephen A. Woodbury

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Effective administration of unemployment insurance (UI) is central to its ability to smooth consumption and act as an automatic stabilizer. The federal government's method of allocating funds to administer UI gives the states no incentive to provide quali...

Would Broadening the UI Tax Base Help Low-Income Workers?

By Mark Duggan, Audrey Guo, and Andrew C. Johnston

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Unemployment insurance (UI) tax bases vary significantly in the United States, from a low of $7,000 annually in California to a high of $52,700 in Washington. Previous research has provided surprisingly little guidance regarding the consequences of this v...

Should We Have Automatic Triggers for Unemployment Benefit Duration and How Costly Would They Be?

By Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Peter Ganong, and Jonathan Gruber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We model automatic trigger policies for unemployment insurance by simulating a weekly panel of individual labor market histories, grouped by state. We reach three conclusions: (i) policies designed to trigger immediately at the onset of a recession result...

Youth Hiring and Labor Market Tightness

By Eliza C. Forsythe

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

It is well-known that recessions can lead to long-term scarring for young workers. I show that employers hire fewer young workers when there are few job openings per unemployed job seeker, while hiring rates for workers with more than 10 years of potentia...

Soft Skills in the Youth Labor Market

By Sara B. Heller and Judd B. Kessler

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

This paper provides new descriptive evidence about which soft skills employers value in young, entry-level workers. We ran employer surveys as part of an experiment to generate letters of recommendation for New York City's Summer Youth Employment Program ...

What's in a Job? Evaluating the Effect of Private Sector Employment Experience on Student Academic Outcomes

By Alicia Sasser Modestino, Urbashee Paul, and Joseph McLaughlin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Although subsidized summer jobs programs have been shown to improve youth outcomes, little is known about the effects of private sector employment experiences. We study a unique program that brokers employer-paid summer internships for youth across a vari...

A General Solution to the Problem of Setting Optimal Default Options

By B. Douglas Bernheim and Jonas Mueller-Gastell

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We examine the problem of setting optimal default options such as passively selected contribution rates in employee-directed pension plans. Existing results suggest that a simple rule of thumb, opt-out minimization, is optimal under special conditions, bu...

What Can Economists Learn from Happiness Research?

By Bruno S. Frey and Alois Stutzer

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2002

In recent years, there has been a steadily increasing interest on the part of economists in happiness research. We argue that reported subjective well-being is a satisfactory empirical approximation to individual utility and that happiness research is abl...

Present Bias Causes and Then Dissipates Auto-enrollment Savings Effects

By John Beshears, James Choi, David Laibson, and Peter Maxted

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Present bias causes procrastination, which leads households to stick with auto-enrollment defaults. However, present bias also engenders overconsumption. Separation from each employer generates a rollover of 401(k) balances to an individual retirement acc...

Do State-Sponsored Retirement Plans Boost Retirement Saving?

By John Chalmers, Olivia S. Mitchell, Jonathan Reuter, and Mingli Zhong

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Oregon recently launched an automatic-enrollment retirement savings program for private sector workers lacking access to other workplace retirement plans. We analyze participation choices, account balances, and inflow/outflow data using administrative rec...

Precautionary Liquidity and Retirement Saving

By Marie Briere, James Poterba, and Ariane Szafarz

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Precautionary demand for liquidity manifests itself as a preference for holding assets in an accessible form not because of any current liquidity need but because of a possible future need. We explore such demand by analyzing employer-sponsored retirement...

Scapegoating during Crises

By Leonardo Bursztyn, Georgy Egorov, Ingar Haaland, Aakaash Rao, and Christopher Roth

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Economic crises are often accompanied by waves of antiminority behavior. We build on the framework developed in Bursztyn et al. (2022) to propose that crises, in addition to shifting people's attitudes toward minorities, can provide intolerant people with...

Is the Partisan Divide Real? Polarization in Preferences for Redistribution

By Brad Nathan, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, and Alejandro Zentner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

There is a widespread belief that Republicans and Democrats are worlds apart with respect to their preferences for redistribution. However, is that partisan divide real? In this paper, we discuss evidence from the General Social Survey and a tailored surv...

Eliciting People's First-Order Concerns: Text Analysis of Open-Ended Survey Questions

By Beatrice Ferrario and Stefanie Stantcheva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We illustrate the design and use of open-ended survey questions to elicit people's first-order concerns on policies. Closed-ended questions are the backbone of surveys but may prime respondents to select some answers and may omit relevant options. Open-en...

Does (All) Police Violence Cause De-policing? Evidence from George Floyd and Police Shootings in Minneapolis

By Maya Mikdash and Reem Zaiour

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We test for a "Ferguson Effect" by studying how police effort responds to different incidents of police violence. We do so using two settings in Minneapolis: (1) George Floyd's murder, and (2) police-involved shootings. We find that following George Floyd...

Law Enforcement Officers' Bills of Rights and Police Violence

By Jamein P. Cunningham, D. L. Feir, Rob Gillezeau, Matthew Harvey, and Abdul Nasser Rad

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

There is widespread concern among activists and legal scholars that Law Enforcement Officers' Bills of Rights (LEOBRs) limit police accountability and potentially impact the use of force. We exploit variation in the timing of the adoption of LEOBRs across...

Police Frisks

By David S. Abrams, Hanming Fang, and Priyanka Goonetilleke

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The standard economic model of police frisks implies that the contraband hit rate should rise when the number of frisks falls, ceteris paribus. We provide the first empirical corroboration of such models of police behavior by examining changes in frisks f...

Measuring Police Performance: Public Attitudes Expressed in Twitter

By Taeho Kim

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

I study the viability of Twitter-based measures for measuring public attitudes about the police. I find that Twitter-based measures track Gallup's measure of public attitudes toward the police starting around 2014, when the Twitter user base stabilized, b...