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...

Immigration, Employment Opportunities, and Criminal Behavior

By Matthew Freedman, Emily Owens, and Sarah Bohn

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2018

We take advantage of provisions of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), which granted legal resident status to long-time unauthorized residents but created new obstacles to employment for more recent immigrants, to explore how employment...

Life-Cycle Consumption Patterns at Older Ages in the United States and the United Kingdom: Can Medical Expenditures Explain the Difference?

By James Banks, Richard Blundell, Peter Levell, and James P. Smith

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2019

This paper documents significantly steeper declines in nondurable expenditures at older ages in the United Kingdom compared to the United States, in spite of income paths being similar. Several possible causes are explored, including different employment ...

When place matters most

[Research Highlight]

April 03, 2020

Moving to nicer neighborhoods has lasting effects on kids' outcomes, especially in their teenage years.

The Aging of the Baby Boomers: Demographics and Propagation of Tax Shocks

By Domenico Ferraro and Giuseppe Fiori

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2020

We study how the changing demographic composition of the US labor force has affected the response of the unemployment rate to marginal tax rate shocks. Using narratively identified tax changes as proxies for structural shocks, we establish that the respon...

A Quantitative Theory of Information, Worker Flows, and Wage Dispersion

By Amanda M. Michaud

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2018

Employer learning provides a link between wage and employment dynamics. Workers who are selectively terminated when their low productivity is revealed subsequently earn lower wages. If learning is asymmetric across employers, randomly separated high-produ...

Riddles and Models: A Review Essay on Michel De Vroey's A History of Macroeconomics from Keynes to Lucas and Beyond

By Costas Azariadis

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2018

This essay reviews Michel De Vroey's important new book on the history of macroeconomics, which extends to business cycles an earlier book by the same author on the history of involuntary unemployment. The review also offers a broader nontechnical surve...

Uninsured Unemployment Risk and Optimal Monetary Policy in a Zero-Liquidity Economy

By Edouard Challe

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2020

I study optimal monetary policy in a sticky-price economy wherein households precautionary-save against uninsured, endogenous unemployment risk. In this economy greater unemployment risk raises desired savings, causing aggregate demand to fall and feed ...

Automation and New Tasks: How Technology Displaces and Reinstates Labor

[Symposium: Automation and Employment]

By Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2019

We present a framework for understanding the effects of automation and other types of technological changes on labor demand, and use it to interpret changes in US employment over the recent past. At the center of our framework is the allocation of tasks...

The Marginal Propensity to Consume over the Business Cycle

By Tal Gross, Matthew J. Notowidigdo, and Jialan Wang

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2020

We estimate how the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of liquidity varies over the business cycle. Ten years after a Chapter 7 bankruptcy, the bankruptcy flag is removed from the filer's credit report, generating an increase in credit score. In the...

Clearing the Fog: The Predictive Power of Weather for Employment Reports and Their Asset Price Responses

By Daniel J. Wilson

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2019

This paper exploits vast granular data—with over one million county-month observations—to estimate a dynamic panel data model of weather's local employment effects. The fitted county model is then aggregated and used to generate in-sample and rolling ...