A puzzling success

[Research Highlight]

April 05, 2018

An entrepreneurship program in Chile worked, but not as expected.

From the archives: How the growing service sector shrank the gender gap

[Research Highlight]

April 13, 2018

In the 2018 AEJ: Macroeconomics Best Paper, the authors study how the rise of service sector jobs increased opportunities for women.

From the archives: Can temporary affirmative action policies have lasting effects?

[Research Highlight]

April 13, 2018

In the 2018 AEJ: Applied Best Paper, the authors study how hiring regulations can lead to fundamental changes in how employers recruit.

Selection and Market Reallocation: Productivity Gains from Multinational Production

By Laura Alfaro and Maggie X. Chen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2018

Assessing productivity gains from multinational production has been a vital topic of economic research and policy debate. Positive productivity gains are often attributed to productivity spillovers; however, an alternative, much less emphasized channel ...

Creating criminals?

[Research Highlight]

May 02, 2018

Restricting immigrants’ ability to work causes an increase in financially motivated crime.

How Do Changes in Housing Voucher Design Affect Rent and Neighborhood Quality?

By Robert Collinson and Peter Ganong

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2018

US housing voucher holders pay their landlord a fraction of household income and the government pays the rest, up to a rent ceiling. We study how two types of changes to the rent ceiling affect landlords and tenants. A policy that makes vouchers more gene...

The Role of Startups in Structural Transformation

By Robert C. Dent, Fatih Karahan, Benjamin Pugsley, and Ayşegül Şahin

American Economic Review, May 2016

The U.S. economy has been going through a striking structural transformation--the secular reallocation of employment across sectors--over the past several decades. We propose a decomposition framework to assess the contributions of various margins of firm...

Putting a price on prejudice

[Research Highlight]

June 08, 2018

Workplace discrimination is expensive. At what point does it become too costly for the discriminator?

Protecting American jobs?

[Page]

Immigration barriers intended to boost domestic wages and employment may offer little help to US workers.

Taking professors' privilege

[Research Highlight]

July 20, 2018

How does denying researchers full rights to their work affect startup activity at universities?

Job killer or creator?

[Page]

What impact did a $15 per hour minimum wage have on the employment rate in three cities?

The Effect of Terrorism on Employment and Consumer Sentiment: Evidence from Successful and Failed Terror Attacks

By Abel Brodeur

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2018

This paper examines the economic consequences of terror attacks by exploiting the inherent randomness in the success or failure of terror attacks. The findings suggest that successful attacks, in comparison to failed attacks, reduce the number of jobs and...

Escaping to opportunity

[Research Highlight]

September 18, 2018

Leaving impoverished public housing projects has profound long-term consequences for children.

All quiet on the job front

[Research Highlight]

October 01, 2018

How costly are recessions for veterans?

2018 in Research Highlights

[Research Highlight]

November 27, 2018

Economists tackled gender issues, education, globalization, and more.

Labor Drops: Experimental Evidence on the Return to Additional Labor in Microenterprises

By Suresh de Mel, David McKenzie, and Christopher Woodruff

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

A field experiment in Sri Lanka provided wage subsidies to randomly chosen microenterprises to test whether hiring additional labor benefits such firms, and whether a short-term subsidy can have a lasting impact on firm employment. Using 12 rounds of surv...

Flexible(ish) working hours

[Research Highlight]

February 06, 2019

How does part-time work respond to economic swings?

Survey says?

[Research Highlight]

April 02, 2019

Inaccurate Census data has led researchers to underestimate the effectiveness of anti-poverty programs.

Connecting Africa to the digital fastlane

[Research Highlight]

March 27, 2019

How did high-speed, high-capacity Internet affect African businesses and workers?

Understanding "underemployment"

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A new paper explores the dynamics when college graduates take jobs for which they are overqualified.