Trade Liberalization and Regional Dynamics

By Rafael Dix-Carneiro and Brian K. Kovak

American Economic Review, October 2017

We study the evolution of trade liberalization's effects on Brazilian local labor markets. Regions facing larger tariff cuts experienced prolonged declines in formal sector employment and earnings relative to other regions. The impact of tariff changes on...

Women and Affirmative Action

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By Jonathan S. Leonard

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1989

This paper reviews evidence indicating that, as it has been enforced so far, affirmative action has contributed negligibly to women's progress in the workplace. Affirmative action can be modeled as a tax on employers whose female employment growth falls b...

The History of Technological Anxiety and the Future of Economic Growth: Is This Time Different?

[Symposium: Automation and Labor Markets]

By Joel Mokyr, Chris Vickers, and Nicolas L. Ziebarth

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

Technology is widely considered the main source of economic progress, but it has also generated cultural anxiety throughout history. The developed world is now suffering from another bout of such angst. Anxieties over technology can take on several fo...

Taxes and Employment Subsidies in Optimal Redistribution Programs

By Paul Beaudry, Charles Blackorby, and Dezsö Szalay

American Economic Review, March 2009

This paper explores how to optimally set taxes and transfers when taxation authorities are uninformed about individuals' value of time in both market and nonmarket activities; and can observe both market-income and time allocated to market employment. ...

Nursery Cities: Urban Diversity, Process Innovation, and the Life Cycle of Products

By Gilles Duranton and Diego Puga

American Economic Review, December 2001

This paper develops microfoundations for the role that diversified cities play in fostering innovation. A simple model of process innovation is proposed, where firms learn about their ideal production process by making prototypes. We build around this a d...

Market Externalities of Large Unemployment Insurance Extension Programs

By Rafael Lalive, Camille Landais, and Josef Zweimüller

American Economic Review, December 2015

We provide evidence that unemployment insurance affects equilibrium conditions in the labor market, which creates significant "market externalities." We provide a framework for identification of such equilibrium effects and implement it using the Regional...

The Effect of Criminal Records on Access to Employment

By Amanda Agan and Sonja Starr

American Economic Review, May 2017

This paper adds to the empirical evidence that criminal records are a barrier to employment. Using data from 2,655 online applications sent on behalf of fictitious male applicants, we show that employers are 60 percent more likely to call applicants that ...

Work and Welfare: Lessons on Employment Programs

[Symposium: Welfare and Workfare]

By Judith M. Gueron

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1990

The nation's social welfare policy reflects an ongoing effort to balance sometimes competing objectives—alleviating poverty and promoting self-sufficiency—in a manner consistent with underlying public values about the primacy of the family and...

Wages and Informality in Developing Countries

By Costas Meghir, Renata Narita, and Jean-Marc Robin

American Economic Review, April 2015

We develop an equilibrium wage-posting model with heterogeneous firms that decide to locate in the formal or the informal sector and workers who search randomly on and off the job. We estimate the model on Brazilian labor force survey data. In equilibr...

Intergenerational Networks, Unemployment, and Persistent Inequality in South Africa

By Jeremy R. Magruder

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2010

This paper examines the importance of network-based intergenerational correlations in South Africa. I use longitudinal data on young South Africans to examine the covariance of children's employment with the usefulness of parents in their job search. I...

How Hurricanes Affect Wages and Employment in Local Labor Markets

By Ariel R. Belasen and Solomon W. Polachek

American Economic Review, May 2008

Do Matching Frictions Explain Unemployment? Not in Bad Times

By Pascal Michaillat

American Economic Review, June 2012

This paper proposes a search-and-matching model of unemployment in which jobs are rationed: the labor market does not clear in the absence of matching frictions. This job shortage arises in an economic equilibrium from the combination of some wage rigidit...

Child Protection and Child Outcomes: Measuring the Effects of Foster Care

By Joseph J. Doyle Jr.

American Economic Review, December 2007

Little is known about the effects of placing children who are abused or neglected into foster care. This paper uses the placement tendency of child protection investigators as an instrumental variable to identify causal effects of foster care on long-te...

Cyclical Variation in Labor Hours and Productivity Using the ATUS

By Michael C. Burda, Daniel S. Hamermesh, and Jay Stewart

American Economic Review, May 2013

We examine monthly variation in weekly work hours using data from 2003 to 2010. The data sources include the Current Population Survey (CPS) on hours/worker, the Current Employment Survey (CES) on hours/job, and the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) on both...

Horizons of Understanding: A Review of Ray Fair's Estimating How the Macroeconomy Works

By Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2008

Ray Fair's Estimating How the Macroeconomy Works is the latest in a series of books by Fair that build, estimate, and apply his macroeconometric model to study the U.S. economy. In this book, Fair updates the model to incorporate the most recent data a...

The Impact of Immigrants on Host Country Wages, Employment and Growth

[Symposium: Immigration]

By Rachel M. Friedberg and Jennifer Hunt

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1995

The popular belief that immigrants have a large adverse impact on the wages and employment opportunities of the native-born population of the receiving country is not supported by the empirical evidence. A 10 percent increase in the fraction of immigrants...

Job Polarization and Structural Change

By Zsófia L. Bárány and Christian Siegel

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2018

We document that job polarization—contrary to the consensus—has started as early as the 1950s in the United States: middle-wage workers have been losing both in terms of employment and average wage growth compared to low- and high-wage workers...

Job Search Behavior over the Business Cycle

By Toshihiko Mukoyama, Christina Patterson, and Ayşegül Şahin

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2018

We create a novel measure of job search effort exploiting the American Time Use and Current Population Surveys. We examine the cyclicality of search effort using time-series, cross-state, and individual variation and find that it is countercyclical. We th...

Trade Liberalization and Gender Inequality

By Chinhui Juhn, Gergely Ujhelyi, and Carolina Villegas-Sanchez

American Economic Review, May 2013

We consider a model where firms differ in their productivity and workers are differentiated by skill and gender. A reduction in tariffs induces more productive firms to modernize their technology and enter the export market. New technologies involve compu...

Unemployment Insurance as a Housing Market Stabilizer

By Joanne W. Hsu, David A. Matsa, and Brian T. Melzer

American Economic Review, January 2018

This paper studies the impact of unemployment insurance (UI) on the housing market. Exploiting heterogeneity in UI generosity across US states and over time, we find that UI helps the unemployed avoid mortgage default. We estimate that UI expansions durin...