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...

Firms' Internal Networks and Local Economic Shocks

By Xavier Giroud and Holger M. Mueller

American Economic Review, October 2019

Using confidential establishment-level data from the US Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database, this paper documents how local shocks propagate across US regions through firms' internal networks of establishments. Consistent with a model of optima...

Rational Inattention in Hiring Decisions

By Sushant Acharya and Shu Lin Wee

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2020

We provide an information-based theory of matching efficiency fluctuations. Rationally inattentive firms have limited capacity to process information and cannot perfectly identify suitable applicants. During recessions, higher losses from hiring unsuitabl...

Did Unconventional Interventions Unfreeze the Credit Market?

By Hui Tong and Shang-Jin Wei

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2020

This paper investigates whether and how unconventional interventions in 2008–2010 unfroze the credit market. We construct a dataset of 198 interventions for 16 countries during 2008–2010 and examine heterogeneous responses in stock prices to the inter...

Employed for Higher Pay? How Medicare Payment Rules Affect Hospital Employment of Physicians

By David Dranove and Christopher Ody

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2019

Hospitals employ an increasing number of physicians and bill for a growing share of outpatient procedures. We exploit a plausibly exogenous increase in Medicare prices for hospital-employed physicians relative to Medicare prices for other physicians to sh...

Commuting, Migration, and Local Employment Elasticities

By Ferdinando Monte, Stephen J. Redding, and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

American Economic Review, December 2018

We provide theory and evidence that the elasticity of local employment to a labor demand shock is heterogeneous depending on the commuting openness of the local labor market. We develop a quantitative general equilibrium model that incorporates spatial li...

Mismatch Unemployment and the Geography of Job Search

By Ioana Marinescu and Roland Rathelot

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2018

Could we significantly reduce US unemployment by helping job seekers move closer to jobs? Using data from the leading employment board CareerBuilder.com, we show that, indeed, workers dislike applying to distant jobs: job seekers are 35 percent less likel...

The Economic Impact of Hurricane Katrina on Its Victims: Evidence from Individual Tax Returns

By Tatyana Deryugina, Laura Kawano, and Steven Levitt

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2018

Hurricane Katrina destroyed over 200,000 homes and led to massive economic and physical dislocation. Using a panel of tax return data, we provide one of the first comprehensive analyses of the hurricane's long-term economic impact on its victims. Hurrican...

Short-Run and Long-Run Effects of Milton Friedman's Presidential Address

[Symposium: Friedman's Natural Rate Hypothesis after 50 Years]

By Robert E. Hall and Thomas J. Sargent

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2018

The centerpiece of Milton Friedman's (1968) presidential address to the American Economic Association, delivered in Washington, DC, on December 29, 1967, was the striking proposition that monetary policy has no longer-run effects on the real economy. Fr...

On the Controversies behind the Origins of the Federal Economic Statistics

[Symposium: Public Provision of Economic Data]

By Hugh Rockoff

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2019

Our federal economic statistics originated in the economic and political divisions in the United States and the bitter debates over economic policy they engendered at the end of the 19th century and during the world wars and Great Depression. Workers we...

Who Really Benefits from Consumption Tax Cuts? Evidence from a Large VAT Reform in France

By Youssef Benzarti and Dorian Carloni

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2019

This paper evaluates the incidence of a large cut in value-added taxes (VATs) for French sit-down restaurants in 2009. In contrast to previous studies, which only focus on the price effects of VAT reforms, we estimate the effects of the VAT cut on four gr...