The Race between Man and Machine: Implications of Technology for Growth, Factor Shares, and Employment

By Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo

American Economic Review, June 2018

We examine the concerns that new technologies will render labor redundant in a framework in which tasks previously performed by labor can be automated and new versions of existing tasks, in which labor has a comparative advantage, can be created. In a s...

Rural Roads and Local Economic Development

By Sam Asher and Paul Novosad

American Economic Review, March 2020

Nearly one billion people worldwide live in rural areas without access to national paved road networks. We estimate the impacts of India's 40 billion USD national rural road construction program using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and comprehens...

New Evidence on the Cyclicality of Employer-to-Employer Flows from Canada

By Alice Nakamura, Emi Nakamura, Kyle Phong, and Jón Steinsson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper presents new estimates of gross worker flows for Canada for the sample period 1978 to 2016. We use administrative data from the Canadian Record of Employment in combination with the Canadian Labor Force Survey to estimate employer-to-employer f...

Flow Origins of Labor Force Participation Fluctuations

By Michael Elsby, Bart Hobijn, Fatih Karahan, Gizem Koşar, and Ayşegül Şahin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We investigate the origins of cyclical and trend movements in the labor force participation rate (LFPR) using a three-state flow decomposition. The procyclicality of LFPR can be traced to cyclical flows between employment and unemployment. By contrast, la...

Place-Based Policies, Creation, and Agglomeration Economies: Evidence from China's Economic Zone Program

By Yi Lu, Jin Wang, and Lianming Zhu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

Combining rich firm and administrative data, this paper examines the incidence and effectiveness of a prominent place-based policy in China: special economic zones. Establishing zones is found to have had a positive effect on capital investment, employmen...

Elasticity of Medicaid Access with Respect to State Financial Distress

By Victoria Perez, Joseph Benitez, and Eric Seiber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

In 2016, total Medicaid spending, $574.2 billion, represented one-third of state budgets. Descriptive studies indicate that state policymakers adjust social welfare programs during times of financial distress, particularly Medicaid. The challenge of forma...

Male Social Status and Women's Work

By Arielle Bernhardt, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Natalia Rigol, Simone Schaner, and Charity Troyer-Moore

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Female labor force participation varies significantly even among countries with similar levels of economic development. Recent studies have shown that gender norms can help explain these differences in women's work, but the channels through which norms im...

The Effect of the Disability Insurance Application Decision on the Employment of Denied Applicants

By Mashfiqur R. Khan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) affects the labor supply of applicants through its work discouragement and through human capital deterioration regardless of the ultimate acceptance or denial of the claim. In this paper, I provide an estimate o...

A Macroeconomic Approach to Optimal Unemployment Insurance: Theory

By Camille Landais, Pascal Michaillat, and Emmanuel Saez

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2018

This paper develops a theory of optimal unemployment insurance (UI) in matching models. The optimal UI replacement rate is the conventional Baily-Chetty replacement rate, which solves the tradeoff between insurance and job-search incentives, plus a correc...

Resurrecting the Role of the Product Market Wedge in Recessions

By Mark Bils, Peter J. Klenow, and Benjamin A. Malin

American Economic Review, April 2018

Employment and hours are more cyclical than dictated by productivity and consumption. This intratemporal labor wedge can arise from product or labor market distortions. Based on employee wages, the literature has attributed the intratemporal wedge almost ...

A Letter and Encouragement: Does Information Increase Postsecondary Enrollment of UI Recipients?

By Andrew Barr and Sarah Turner

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2018

For individuals who experience job loss, enrollment in postsecondary programs may provide an opportunity to improve future employment outcomes. However, decisions to enroll may be hampered by insufficient information about the benefits and costs and the n...

When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Young Men

By David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2019

We exploit the gender-specific components of large-scale labor demand shocks stemming from rising international manufacturing competition to test how shifts in the relative economic stature of young men versus young women affected marriage, fertility, and...

Disentangling the Effects of a Banking Crisis: Evidence from German Firms and Counties

By Kilian Huber

American Economic Review, March 2018

Lending cuts by banks directly affect the firms borrowing from them, but also indirectly depress economic activity in the regions in which they operate. This paper moves beyond firm-level studies by estimating the effects of an exogenous lending cut by a ...

The Rise of the Gig Economy: Fact or Fiction?

By Katharine G. Abraham, John Haltiwanger, Kristin Sandusky, and James Spletzer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Gig work mediated through online platforms has received much recent attention. We find only one sector—the transportation services sector—in which there is unambiguous evidence of substantial and rapidly growing gig activity. A challenge for tracking ...

Long-Term Treatment Effects of Job Search Assistance and Training: A Summary of Recent Evidence

By Day Manoli and Ankur Patel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper presents a summary of recent evidence on long-term treatment effects from job search assistance and training services on labor market outcomes. The evidence is based on merging program data from three randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to admi...

The Child Left Behind: Parental Incarceration and Adult Human Capital in the United States

By Laura E. Henkhaus

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Exposure to parental incarceration is particularly prevalent in the United States, where about 7 percent of children have lived with a parent who was incarcerated. In this paper, I use nationally representative US data and apply partial identification met...

Retrospectives: Ricardo on Machinery

By Samuel Hollander

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

We are currently experiencing an outpouring of concern both popular and professional regarding technological unemployment. I shall be discussing an apparent about-turn on the subject by David Ricardo (1772-1823), who at different times, even in different ...

Changing Family Attitudes to Promote Female Employment

By Joshua T. Dean and Seema Jayachandran

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

India's female employment rate is one of the lowest in the world. One approach to expanding female employment is to make young women's family members more supportive of them working. We report on the effects of two interventions aimed at increasing family...

Family Ruptures, Stress, and the Mental Health of the Next Generation

By Petra Persson and Maya Rossin-Slater

American Economic Review, April 2018

This paper studies how in utero exposure to maternal stress from family ruptures affects later mental health. We find that prenatal exposure to the death of a maternal relative increases take-up of ADHD medications during childhood and anti-anxiety and de...

Labor Market Uncertainty and Portfolio Choice Puzzles

By Yongsung Chang, Jay H. Hong, and Marios Karabarbounis

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

The standard life-cycle models of household portfolio choice have difficulty generating a realistic age profile of risky share. These models not only imply a high risky share on average but also a steeply decreasing age profile, whereas the risky share is...