The Impacts of Industrial and Entrepreneurial Work on Income and Health: Experimental Evidence from Ethiopia

By Christopher Blattman and Stefan Dercon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2018

Working with five Ethiopian firms, we randomized applicants to an industrial job offer, an "entrepreneurship" program of $300 plus business training, or control status. Industrial jobs offered more and steadier hours but low wages and risky conditions. Th...

Nominal Wage Rigidity in Village Labor Markets

By Supreet Kaur

American Economic Review, October 2019

This paper develops a new approach to test for downward wage rigidity by examining transitory shocks to labor demand (i.e., rainfall) across 600 Indian districts. Nominal wages rise during positive shocks but do not fall during droughts. In addition, tran...

Way Down in the Hole: Adaptation to Long-Term Water Loss in Rural India

By David Blakeslee, Ram Fishman, and Veena Srinivasan

American Economic Review, January 2020

Worsening environmental conditions threaten to undermine progress in reducing rural poverty. Little is known, however, about the prospects for farmer adaptations to mitigate this threat, in particular through opportunities for income diversification prese...

Payroll Taxes, Firm Behavior, and Rent Sharing: Evidence from a Young Workers' Tax Cut in Sweden

By Emmanuel Saez, Benjamin Schoefer, and David Seim

American Economic Review, May 2019

This paper uses administrative data to analyze a large employer-borne payroll tax rate cut for young workers in Sweden. We find no effect on net-of-tax wages of young treated workers relative to slightly older untreated workers, and a 2–3 percentage poi...

Retrospectives: Cost-Push and Demand-Pull Inflation: Milton Friedman and the "Cruel Dilemma"

By Johannes A. Schwarzer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

This paper addresses two conflicting views in the 1950s and 1960s about the inflation-unemployment tradeoff as given by the Phillips curve. Many economists at this time emphasized the issue of a seemingly unavoidable inflationary pressure at or even bel...

The Arrival of Fast Internet and Employment in Africa

By Jonas Hjort and Jonas Poulsen

American Economic Review, March 2019

To show how fast Internet affects employment in Africa, we exploit the gradual arrival of submarine Internet cables on the coast and maps of the terrestrial cable network. Robust difference-in-differences estimates from 3 datasets, covering 12 countries, ...

Tax Policy and Local Labor Market Behavior

By Daniel G. Garrett, Eric Ohrn, and Juan Carlos Suárez Serrato

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2020

Since 2002, the US government has encouraged business investment using accelerated depreciation policies that significantly reduce investment costs. We provide the first in-depth analysis of this stimulus on employment and earnings. Our local labor market...

Trade-Induced Structural Change and the Skill Premium

By Javier Cravino and Sebastian Sotelo

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2019

We study how international trade affects manufacturing employment and the relative wage of unskilled workers when goods and services are traded with different intensities. Manufacturing trade reduces manufacturing prices worldwide, which reduces manufactu...

The road to the Industrial Revolution

[Research Highlight]

April 14, 2020

How did infrastructure accelerate economic growth in the UK?

Corporate Income Tax, Legal Form of Organization, and Employment

By Daphne Chen, Shi Qi, and Don Schlagenhauf

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2018

A dynamic stochastic occupational choice model with heterogeneous agents is developed to evaluate the impact of a corporate income tax reduction on employment. In this framework, the key margin is the endogenous entrepreneurial choice of legal form of org...

In Search of Labor Demand

By Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Ben M. Sand

American Economic Review, September 2018

We propose and estimate a novel specification of labor demand which encompasses search frictions and the role of entrepreneurs in new firm creation. Using city-industry variation over four decades, we estimate the wage elasticity of employment demand to b...

Employment Adjustment and Part-Time Work: Lessons from the United States and the United Kingdom

By Daniel Borowczyk-Martins and Etienne Lalé

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2019

We document that fluctuations in part-time employment play a major role in movements in hours per worker during cyclical swings in the labor market. Building on this result, we develop a stock-flow framework to describe the dynamics of part-time employmen...

The Decline, Rebound, and Further Rise in SNAP Enrollment: Disentangling Business Cycle Fluctuations and Policy Changes

By Peter Ganong and Jeffrey B. Liebman

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2018

One-in-seven Americans received benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in 2011, an all-time high. We analyze changes in program enrollment over the past two decades, quantifying the contributions of unemployment and state policy chang...

The Persistence of Local Joblessness

By Michael Amior and Alan Manning

American Economic Review, July 2018

Differences in employment-population ratios across US commuting zones have persisted for many decades. We claim these disparities represent real gaps in economic opportunity for individuals of fixed characteristics. These gaps persist despite a strong mig...

Economic Drivers of Populism

By Sergei Guriev

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2018

The recent wave of populism is different from the previous ones, thus generating the demand for noneconomic explanations, such as identity politics and cultural factors. In this paper, I discuss several pieces of evidence that show that economic factors, ...

The Optimal Timing of Unemployment Benefits: Theory and Evidence from Sweden

By Jonas Kolsrud, Camille Landais, Peter Nilsson, and Johannes Spinnewijn

American Economic Review, April 2018

This paper provides a simple, yet robust framework to evaluate the time profile of benefits paid during an unemployment spell. We derive sufficient-statistics formulae capturing the marginal insurance value and incentive costs of unemployment benefits p...

The Labor Market Integration of Refugee Migrants in High-Income Countries

[Symposium: Assimilation of Refugees]

By Courtney Brell, Christian Dustmann, and Ian Preston

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

We provide an overview of the integration of refugees into the labor markets of a number of high-income countries. Discussing the ways in which refugees and economic migrants are differently selected and so might be expected to perform differently in a ...

Solo Self-Employment and Alternative Work Arrangements: A Cross-Country Perspective on the Changing Composition of Jobs

By Tito Boeri, Giulia Giupponi, Alan B. Krueger, and Stephen Machin

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2020

The nature of self-employment is changing in most OECD countries. Solo self-employment is increasing relative to self-employment with dependent employees, often being associated with the development of gig economy work and alternative work arrangements....

Endogenous Disasters

By Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, Lu Zhang, and Lars-Alexander Kuehn

American Economic Review, August 2018

Market economies are intrinsically unstable. The standard search model of equilibrium unemployment, once solved accurately with a globally nonlinear algorithm, gives rise endogenously to rare disasters. Intuitively, in the presence of cumulatively large n...

Do Job Destruction Shocks Matter in the Theory of Unemployment?

By Melvyn G. Coles and Ali Moghaddasi Kelishomi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2018

Because the data show that market tightness is not orthogonal to unemployment, this paper identifies the many empirical difficulties caused by adopting the free entry of vacancies assumption in the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides (DMP) framework. Relaxing th...