Communicating Uncertainty in Official Economic Statistics: An Appraisal Fifty Years after Morgenstern

By Charles F. Manski

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

Federal statistical agencies in the United States and analogous agencies elsewhere commonly report official economic statistics as point estimates, without accompanying measures of error. Users of the statistics may incorrectly view them as error free or ...

Habit Persistence, Asset Returns, and the Business Cycle

By Michele Boldrin, Lawrence J. Christiano, and Jonas D. M. Fisher

American Economic Review, March 2001

Two modifications are introduced into the standard real-business-cycle model: habit preferences and a two-sector technology with limited intersectoral factor mobility. The model is consistent with the observed mean risk-free rate, equity premium, and Shar...

Labor Supply Responses to Large Social Transfers: Longitudinal Evidence from South Africa

By Cally Ardington, Anne Case, and Victoria Hosegood

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2009

We quantify the labor supply responses of prime-aged adults to the presence of pensioners in their households, using longitudinal data collected in South Africa. We compare households and individuals before and after pension receipt and pension loss, w...

Unemployment Insurance Fraud and Optimal Monitoring

By David L. Fuller, B. Ravikumar, and Yuzhe Zhang

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2015

An important incentive problem for the design of unemployment insurance is the fraudulent collection of unemployment benefits by workers who are gainfully employed. We show how to efficiently use a combination of tax/subsidy and monitoring to prevent such...

Business Volatility, Job Destruction, and Unemployment

By Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman, John Haltiwanger, Ron Jarmin, and Javier Miranda

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2010

Unemployment inflows fell from 4 percent of employment per month in the early 1980s to 2 percent by the mid 1990s. Using low frequency movements in industry-level data, we estimate that a 1 percentage point drop in the quarterly job destruction rate lo...

Vector Autoregressions

[Symposium: Econometric Tools]

By James H. Stock and Mark W. Watson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2001

This paper critically reviews the use of vector autoregressions (VARs) for four tasks: data description, forecasting, structural inference, and policy analysis. The paper begins with a review of VAR analysis, highlighting the differences between reduced-f...

Does Disability Insurance Receipt Discourage Work? Using Examiner Assignment to Estimate Causal Effects of SSDI Receipt

By Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen, and Alexander Strand

American Economic Review, August 2013

We present the first causal estimates of the effect of Social Security Disability Insurance benefit receipt on labor supply using all program applicants. We use administrative data to match applications to disability examiners and exploit variation in ...

Did the Housing Price Bubble Clobber Local Labor Market Job and Worker Flows When It Burst?

By John M. Abowd and Lars Vilhuber

American Economic Review, May 2012

We use the Census Bureau's Quarterly Workforce Indicators and the Federal Housing Finance Agency's House Price Indices to study the effects of the housing price bubble on local labor markets. We show that the 35 MSAs in the top decile of the house price b...

Liquidity and Insurance for the Unemployed

By Robert Shimer and Ivan Werning

American Economic Review, December 2008

We study unemployment insurance for workers who sequentially sample job opportunities. We focus on the optimal timing of benefits and the desirability of allowing borrowing and saving. When workers have constant absolute risk aversion, a simple policy ...

A Comment on the Economics of Labor Adjustment: Mind the Gap: Evidence from a Monte Carlo Experiment

By Christian Bayer

American Economic Review, December 2009

This comment addresses a point raised in Russell Cooper and Jonathan Willis (2003, 2004), which discusses whether the "gap approach" is appropriate to describe the adjustment of production factors. They show that this approach to labor adjustment as appli...

Zombie Lending and Depressed Restructuring in Japan

By Ricardo J. Caballero, Takeo Hoshi, and Anil K. Kashyap

American Economic Review, December 2008

Large Japanese banks often engaged in sham loan restructurings that kept credit flowing to otherwise insolvent borrowers (which we call zombies). We examine the implications of suppressing the normal competitive process whereby the zombies would shed w...

Soil Endowments, Female Labor Force Participation, and the Demographic Deficit of Women in India

By Eliana Carranza

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Differences in relative female employment by soil texture are used to explain the heterogeneous deficit of female children across districts within India. Soil texture varies exogenously and determines the depth of land tillage. Deep tillage, possible i...

Worker Protection Policies in the New Century

[Symposium: Forecasts for the Future of the Economy]

By Bernard E. Anderson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2000

Federal workplace regulations describe a set of baseline requirements which must apply in every employment relationship. The purpose of such policies is to help improve the standard of living and assure a satisfactory quality of worklife for the workforce...

The Beveridge Curve: A Survey

By Michael W. L. Elsby, Ryan Michaels, and David Ratner

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2015

Important progress has been made in economists' understanding of the Beveridge curve, from its measurement to its expression in canonical labor market models. Yet enduring puzzles remain. Chief among these are the empirical role of vacancies in the recrui...

The New Life Cycle of Women's Employment: Disappearing Humps, Sagging Middles, Expanding Tops

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By Claudia Goldin and Joshua Mitchell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

A new life cycle of women's employment emerged with cohorts born in the 1950s. For prior cohorts, life-cycle employment had a hump shape; it increased from the twenties to the forties, hit a peak, and then declined starting in the fifties. The new life cy...

A Review of Enrico Moretti's The New Geography of Jobs

By Edward Glaeser

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2013

Why is prosperity distributed so unevenly across America's metropolitan areas? While population growth has gone disproportionately towards the Sunbelt, high-skill areas have experienced the strongest income growth since 1970. Gaps between more and less...

Origins of the Unemployment Rate: The Lasting Legacy of Measurement without Theory

By David Card

American Economic Review, May 2011

The modern definition of unemployment emerged in the late 1930s from research conducted at the Works Progress Administration and the Census Bureau. According to this definition, people who are not working but actively searching for work are counted as une...

A Female Style in Corporate Leadership? Evidence from Quotas

By David A. Matsa and Amalia R. Miller

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

This paper studies the impact of gender quotas for corporate board seats on corporate decisions. We examine the introduction of Norway's 2006 quota, comparing affected firms to other Nordic companies, public and private, that are unaffected by the rule...

In with the Big, Out with the Small: Removing Small-Scale Reservations in India

By Leslie A. Martin, Shanthi Nataraj, and Ann E. Harrison

American Economic Review, February 2017

An ongoing debate in employment policy is whether promoting small and medium enterprises creates jobs. We use the elimination of small-scale industry (SSI) promotion in India to address this question. For 60 years, SSI promotion in India focused on rese...

Does the Federal Reserve Care about the Rest of the World?

[Symposium: The First 100 Years of the Federal Reserve]

By Barry Eichengreen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2013

Many economists are accustomed to thinking about Federal Reserve policy in terms of the institution's "dual mandate," which refers to price stability and high employment, and in which the exchange rate and other international variables matter only insof...