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...

Bridging the Intention-Behavior Gap? The Effect of Plan-Making Prompts on Job Search and Employment

By Martin Abel, Rulof Burger, Eliana Carranza, and Patrizio Piraino

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2019

The paper tests the effects of plan making on job search and employment. In a field experiment with unemployed youths, participants who complete a detailed job search plan increase the number of job applications submitted (by 15 percent) but not the time ...

A Macroeconomic Approach to Optimal Unemployment Insurance: Applications

By Camille Landais, Pascal Michaillat, and Emmanuel Saez

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2018

In the United States, unemployment insurance (UI) is more generous when unemployment is high. This paper examines whether this policy is desirable. The optimal UI replacement rate is the Baily-Chetty replacement rate plus a correction term measuring the e...

Underemployment and the Trickle-Down of Unemployment

By Regis Barnichon and Yanos Zylberberg

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2019

A substantial fraction of workers are underemployed, i.e., employed in jobs for which they are overqualified, and that fraction—the underemployment rate—is higher in recessions. To explain these facts, we build a search model with an endogenous "ran...

Gender Equality and Positive Action: Evidence from UK Universities

By Danula K. Gamage and Almudena Sevilla

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper examines the impact of the Athena Scientific Women's Academic Network (SWAN) Charter on the wages and employment trajectories of female faculty. The Athena SWAN Charter is a gender equality initiative that formally recognizes good practice to...

The Twin Ds: Optimal Default and Devaluation

By Seunghoon Na, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé, Martín Uribe, and Vivian Yue

American Economic Review, July 2018

A salient characteristic of sovereign defaults is that they are typically accompanied by large devaluations. This paper presents new evidence of this empirical regularity known as the Twin Ds and proposes a model that rationalizes it as an optimal policy ...

Jobs and Matches: Quits, Replacement Hiring, and Vacancy Chains

By Yusuf Mercan and Benjamin Schoefer

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

In the canonical DMP model of job openings, all job openings stem from new job creation. Jobs denote worker-firm matches, which are destroyed following worker quits. Yet, employers classify 56 percent of vacancies as quit-driven replacement hiring into ol...

The Effect of Export Promotion on Firm-Level Performance

By Jakob Munch and Georg Schaur

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2018

Most countries promote exports. This paper answers two questions: Does export promotion improve firm performance, and do any benefits outweigh costs? We solve self-selection problems by accounting for an extensive set of firm characteristics. In addition,...

Unemployment Cycles

By Jan Eeckhout and Ilse Lindenlaub

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2019

The labor market by itself can create cyclical outcomes, even in the absence of exogenous shocks. We propose a theory in which the search behavior of the employed has profound aggregate implications for the unemployed. There is a strategic complementarity...

How Trade Sensitive Are Energy-Intensive Sectors?

By Carolyn Fischer and Alan K. Fox

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

For most governments looking to implement climate policy—and for interest groups looking to influence it—the effect of unilateral greenhouse gas regulation on employment, production, and emissions represents an overarching concern. Critical to improvi...

Minimum Wages, Morality, and Efficiency: A Choice Experiment

By Conor Lennon, Jose Fernandez, Stephan Gohmann, and Keith Teltser

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We use a choice experiment to examine public support for minimum wages. We first elicit respondents' moral assessment of two labor market systems: one with a minimum wage and one without. Then, we present four pairs of hypothetical employment outcomes and...