Intergenerational Effects of Incarceration

By Manudeep Bhuller, Gordon B. Dahl, Katrine V. Loken, and Magne Mogstad

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

An often overlooked population in discussions of prison reform is the children of inmates. How a child is affected depends both on what incarceration does to their parent and what they learn from their parent's experience. To overcome endogeneity concerns...

Paying to Avoid Recession: Using Reenlistment to Estimate the Cost of Unemployment

By Mark Borgschulte and Paco Martorell

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

This paper provides revealed-preference estimates of the monetary value to workers of a lower unemployment rate at the time of job separation. By examining the decision between reenlisting and exiting the military, we find that service members would sacri...

The Effects of Pretrial Detention on Conviction, Future Crime, and Employment: Evidence from Randomly Assigned Judges

By Will Dobbie, Jacob Goldin, and Crystal S. Yang

American Economic Review, February 2018

Over 20 percent of prison and jail inmates in the United States are currently awaiting trial, but little is known about the impact of pretrial detention on defendants. This paper uses the detention tendencies of quasi-randomly assigned bail judges to esti...

The Returns to a Large Community College Program: Evidence from Admissions Lotteries

By Michel Grosz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

This paper estimates the labor market returns to the associate's degree in nursing (ADN), which is one of the most popular community college programs. I use student-level academic and earnings records across two decades for all community college student...

Switching Costs and Competition in Retirement Investment

By Fernando Luco

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2019

How do different switching costs affect choices and competition in a private pension system? I answer this question in a setting in which variation in employment status allows me to identify two switching costs that jointly affect enrollees' decisions: th...

Investment tax cuts and jobs

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How much does a tax deduction on capital purchases stimulate employment?

The Effects of Micro-entrepreneurship Programs on Labor Market Performance: Experimental Evidence from Chile

By Claudia Martínez A., Esteban Puentes, and Jaime Ruiz-Tagle

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

We investigate the impact of a program providing asset transfers and business training to low income individuals in Chile, and asked whether a larger asset transfer would magnify the program's impact. We randomly assigned participation in a large scale, p...

New Perspectives on the Decline of US Manufacturing Employment

[Symposium: Does the US Really Gain From Trade?]

By Teresa C. Fort, Justin R. Pierce, and Peter K. Schott

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2018

We use relatively unexplored dimensions of US microdata to examine how US manufacturing employment has evolved across industries, firms, establishments, and regions. These data provide support for both trade- and technology-based explanations of the overa...

Some Causal Effects of an Industrial Policy

By Chiara Criscuolo, Ralf Martin, Henry G. Overman, and John Van Reenen

American Economic Review, January 2019

We exploit changes in the area-specific eligibility criteria for a program to support jobs through investment subsidies. European rules determine whether an area is eligible for subsidies, and we construct instrumental variables for area eligibility based...

Consumer Spending during Unemployment: Positive and Normative Implications

By Peter Ganong and Pascal Noel

American Economic Review, July 2019

Using de-identified bank account data, we show that spending drops sharply at the large and predictable decrease in income arising from the exhaustion of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits. We use the high-frequency response to a predictable income decl...

The Long-Run Effects of Teacher Collective Bargaining

By Michael F. Lovenheim and Alexander Willén

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

We analyze how exposure to teacher collective bargaining affects long-run outcomes for students, exploiting the timing of state duty-to-bargain law passage in a cross-cohort difference-in-difference framework. Among men, exposure to a duty-to-bargain law ...

Labor Market Conditions and Discrimination: Is There a Link?

By Karl David Boulware and Kenneth N. Kuttner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper's goal is to determine whether the degree of labor market tightness affects the frequency of discrimination charges. State-level panel data on enforcement and litigation actions from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, along with di...

Job Search Periods for Welfare Applicants: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

By Jonneke Bolhaar, Nadine Ketel, and Bas van der Klaauw

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019

We combine a randomized experiment with administrative data to study the effects of mandatory job search periods in the Dutch welfare system. Job search periods postpone the first welfare benefits payment and encourage applicants to start searching for jo...

Do Credit Market Shocks Affect the Real Economy? Quasi-experimental Evidence from the Great Recession and "Normal" Economic Times

By Michael Greenstone, Alexandre Mas, and Hoai-Luu Nguyen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2020

Using comprehensive data on bank lending and establishment-level outcomes from 1997–2010, this paper finds that small business lending is an unimportant determinant of small business and overall economic activity. A shift-share style research design is ...

The Violent Consequences of Trade-Induced Worker Displacement in Mexico

By Melissa Dell, Benjamin Feigenberg, and Kensuke Teshima

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

Mexican manufacturing job loss induced by competition with China increases cocaine trafficking and violence, particularly in municipalities with transnational criminal organizations. When it becomes more lucrative to traffic drugs because changes in local...

Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Mexican Bracero Exclusion

By Michael A. Clemens, Ethan G. Lewis, and Hannah M. Postel

American Economic Review, June 2018

An important class of active labor market policy has received little impact evaluation: immigration barriers intended to raise wages and employment by shrinking labor supply. Theories of endogenous technical advance raise the possibility of limited or eve...

Labor Supply and the Value of Non-work Time: Experimental Estimates from the Field

By Alexandre Mas and Amanda Pallais

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2019

We estimate the marginal value of non-work time (MVT) using a field experiment. We offered job applicants randomized wage-hour bundles. Choices over these bundles yield estimates of the MVT as a function of hours, tracing out a labor supply relationship. ...

Retrospectives: Lord Keynes and Mr. Say: A Proximity of Ideas

By Alain Béraud and Guy Numa

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2019

Since the publication of Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, generations of economists have been led to believe that Say was Keynes's ultimate nemesis. By means of textual and contextual analysis, we show that Keynes and Say held ...

What Happened: Financial Factors in the Great Recession

[Symposium: Macroeconomics a Decade after the Great Recession]

By Mark Gertler and Simon Gilchrist

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2018

At the onset of the recent global financial crisis, the workhorse macroeconomic models assumed frictionless financial markets. These frameworks were thus not able to anticipate the crisis, nor to analyze how the disruption of credit markets changed what i...

Who Pays for the Minimum Wage?

By Peter Harasztosi and Attila Lindner

American Economic Review, August 2019

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the margins along which firms responded to a large and persistent minimum wage increase in Hungary. We show that employment elasticities are negative but small even four years after the reform; that around...