The Phillips Curve: Back to the '60s?

By Olivier Blanchard

American Economic Review, May 2016

This paper reexamines the behavior of inflation and unemployment and reaches four conclusions: 1) The U.S. Phillips curve is alive and well (at least as well as in the past). 2) Inflation expectations however have become steadily more anchored. 3) The slo...

Welfare-Based Optimal Monetary Policy with Unemployment and Sticky Prices: A Linear-Quadratic Framework

By Federico Ravenna and Carl E. Walsh

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2011

We derive a linear-quadratic model that is consistent with sticky prices and search and matching frictions in the labor market. We show that the second-order approximation to the welfare of the representative agent depends on inflation and "gaps" that inv...

The Microeconomic Dimensions of the Eurozone Crisis and Why European Politics Cannot Solve Them

By Christian Thimann

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

The academic and policy debate about the crisis in Europe's single currency area is usually dominated by macroeconomic and public sector considerations. The microeconomic dimensions of the crisis and the private sector issues typically get much less att...

Stimulating Local Public Employment: Do General Grants Work?

By Heléne Lundqvist, Matz Dahlberg, and Eva Mörk

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2014

We apply the regression kink design to the Swedish grant system and estimate causal effects of intergovernmental grants on local public employment. Our robust conclusion is that grants do not stimulate local public employment. We find no statistically ...

The Missing Food Problem: Trade, Agriculture, and International Productivity Differences

By Trevor Tombe

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2015

Agriculture in poor countries has low productivity, high employment, and negligible trade flows relative to other sectors. These facts motivate a multisector, open-economy view of international productivity differences. With a quantitative multicountry mo...

The Ongoing Evolution of US Retail: A Format Tug-of-War

[Symposium: The Future of Retail]

By Ali Hortaçsu and Chad Syverson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2015

The past 15-20 years have seen substantial and visible changes in the way US retail business is conducted. Explanations about what is happening in the retail sector have been dominated by two powerful and not fully consistent narratives: a predictio...

Forensic Economics

By Eric Zitzewitz

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2012

A new meta-field of "forensic economics" has begun to emerge, uncovering evidence of hidden behavior in a variety of domains. Examples include teachers cheating on exams, road builders skimping on materials, violations of U.N. sanctions, unnecessary heart...

Immigration, Offshoring, and American Jobs

By Gianmarco I. P. Ottaviano, Giovanni Peri, and Greg C. Wright

American Economic Review, August 2013

Following Grossman and Rossi-Hansberg (2008) we present a model in which tasks of varying complexity are matched to workers of varying skill in order to develop and test predictions regarding the effects of immigration and offshoring on US native-born wor...

Recessions, Older Workers, and Longevity: How Long Are Recessions Good for Your Health?

By Courtney C. Coile, Phillip B. Levine, and Robin McKnight

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2014

Although past research has found that recessions reduce contemporaneous mortality, workers nearing retirement age may experience reduced longevity attributable to lengthy unemployment spells and lost health insurance at a particularly vulnerable time. To ...

The Effect of Unemployment Benefits and Nonemployment Durations on Wages

By Johannes F. Schmieder, Till von Wachter, and Stefan Bender

American Economic Review, March 2016

We estimate that unemployment insurance (UI ) extensions reduce reemployment wages using sharp age discontinuities in UI eligibility in Germany. We show this effect combines two key policy parameters: the effect of UI on reservation wages and the effec...

Low-Skilled Immigration and the Labor Supply of Highly Skilled Women

By Patricia Cortés and José Tessada

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2011

Low-skilled immigrants represent a significant fraction of employment in services that are close substitutes of household production. This paper studies whether the increased supply of low-skilled immigrants has led high-skilled women, who have the highes...

Using Differences in Knowledge across Neighborhoods to Uncover the Impacts of the EITC on Earnings

By Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, and Emmanuel Saez

American Economic Review, December 2013

We estimate the impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit on labor supply using local variation in knowledge about the EITC schedule. We proxy for EITC knowledge in a Zip code with the fraction of individuals who manipulate reported self-employment incom...

The Impacts of Microcredit: Evidence from Ethiopia

By Alessandro Tarozzi, Jaikishan Desai, and Kristin Johnson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

We use data from a randomized controlled trial conducted in 2003-2006 in rural Amhara and Oromiya (Ethiopia) to study the impacts of increasing access to microfinance on a number of socioeconomic outcomes, including income from agriculture, animal husband...

Minority Groups in the Economics Profession

By Susan M. Collins

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2000

The primary objective of this paper is to provide information about minorities (blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans)in economics, at various stages in the education pipeline, and in the labor market. Despite sustained increases in the numbers and perce...

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

By Russell Cooper and Jonathan L. Willis

American Economic Review, December 2009

This note responds to Christian Bayer (2009). Cooper and Willis (2004), hereafter CW, find the aggregate nonlinearities reported in Ricardo Caballero and Eduardo Engel (1993) and Caballero, Engel, and John Haltiwanger (1997) reflect mismeasurement of the ...

When the Floodgates Open: "Northern" Firms' Response to Removal of Trade Quotas on Chinese Goods

By Hale Utar

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2014

Using the dismantling of the Multi-fibre Arrangement quotas on Chinese textile products in conjunction with China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), within firms adjustments to intensified low-wage competition is analyzed. Employing Dan...

Endogenous Liquidity and the Business Cycle

By Saki Bigio

American Economic Review, June 2015

I study an economy where asymmetric information about the quality of capital endogenously determines liquidity. Liquid funds are key to relaxing financial constraints on investment and employment. These funds are obtained by selling capital or using it as...

Job-to-Job Flows in the Great Recession

By Henry Hyatt and Erika McEntarfer

American Economic Review, May 2012

We develop prototype job-to-job flow measures to provide new evidence on labor turnover and earnings dynamics in the Great Recession. We find a sharp drop in job mobility in the Great Recession, much sharper than the previous recession, and higher earning...

On the Driving Forces behind Cyclical Movements in Employment and Job Reallocation

By Steven J. Davis and John Haltiwanger

American Economic Review, December 1999

Theory restricts short-run job creation and destruction responses and cumulative employment and job reallocation responses to allocative and aggregate shocks. We formulate these restrictions and implement them for postwar data on U.S. manufacturing. Alloc...

The Possible Unemployment Cost of Average Inflation below a Credible Target

By Lars E. O. Svensson

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2015

If inflation expectations become firmly anchored at the inflation target even when average inflation deviates from the target, the long-run Phillips curve becomes nonvertical. During 1997-2011, average inflation expectations in Sweden have been close to t...