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...

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...