National Fiscal Policies to Fight Recessions in US States

By Karen Dynan and Douglas Elmendorf

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Countercyclical fiscal policy generally focuses on national economic downturns. But US states experience significantly different patterns of unemployment, and demand shocks appear to drive much of that variation. State budget rules limit the ability of st...

Employment and Earnings for Federal Government Economists: Empirical Evidence by Gender and Race

By Lucia Foster, Julia Manzella, Erika McEntarfer, and Danielle H. Sandler

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We contribute to the literature on diversity in the economics profession, which has mostly focused on academia, by providing a first look at the employment and earnings of federal government economists by gender and race. Combining micro-level data on fed...

Competing with Robots: Firm-Level Evidence from France

By Daron Acemoglu, Claire Lelarge, and Pascual Restrepo

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

We study the firm-level implications of robot adoption in France. Of 55,390 firms in our sample, 598 adopted robots between 2010 and 2015, but these firms accounted for 20 percent of manufacturing employment. Adopters experienced significant declines in l...

Firm-Level Automation: Evidence from the Netherlands

By James Bessen, Maarten Goos, Anna Salomons, and Wiljan van den Berge

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Studying firm-level adjustments is important for understanding the economic effects of workplace automation. So far, emerging firm-level evidence is focused on robotics and the manufacturing sector. In this paper, we document that the adoption of automati...

Within-Occupation Changes Dominate Changes in What Workers Do: A Shift-Share Decomposition, 2005–2015

By Richard B. Freeman, Ina Ganguli, and Michael J. Handel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper measures aggregate changes in job characteristics in the United States from 2005 to 2015 and decomposes those changes into components representing shifts within occupations and changes in occupational employment shares. Per our title, within-oc...

The Role of Broad-Based Employee Ownership Opportunities in Prisoner Reentry

By Robynn Cox

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This research investigates the relationship between Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) and criminal participation as measured by arrests, conviction, and incarceration among formerly incarcerated individuals. Using the 1997 National Longitudinal Surve...

Immigration Enforcement, Deterrence, and Crime

By Sandra Orozco-Aleman and Heriberto Gonzalez-Lozano

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

Does interior enforcement selectively deter Mexican migration? Our study shows that more aggressive enforcement increases the likelihood of having immigrants with US work experience and with jobs secured in the United States before their migration. We als...

Real Effects of Sovereign Debt Inflow Shocks

By Lorenzo Pandolfi and Tomas Williams

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2020

This paper analyzes the real effects on firms of sovereign debt inflow shocks in emerging countries. We follow Broner et al. (2019) and exploit six episodes of country inclusions into two major local currency sovereign debt indexes. We complement their ev...

Reviving neighborhoods in rust-belt cities

[Research Highlight]

May 21, 2020

Why are areas near Detroit’s thriving downtown less developed than ones further away?

Scrutinizing for-profit colleges

[Research Highlight]

May 06, 2020

Stephanie Cellini discusses the ways students are affected in a much maligned industry.

Long-Run Effects from Comprehensive Student Support: Evidence from Pathways to Education

By Adam M. Lavecchia, Philip Oreopoulos, and Robert S. Brown

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2020

Offering comprehensive education support services to disadvantaged students shows promise for improving academic attainment. We explore longer-term impacts of the Pathways to Education program, a set of coaching, tutoring, group activities, and financial ...

Clean hands and dirty jobs

[Research Highlight]

June 16, 2020

How much do politicians’ relatives get special treatment on the job market?

Front-Loading the Unemployment Benefit: An Empirical Assessment

By Attila Lindner and Balázs Reizer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2020

We estimate the effect of front-loading unemployment benefit payments on nonemployment duration and reemployment wages. Exploiting a sharp change in the path of benefits for those who claimed unemployment benefits after November 1, 2005 in Hungary, we sho...

The Value of Reference Letters: Experimental Evidence from South Africa

By Martin Abel, Rulof Burger, and Patrizio Piraino

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2020

We show that reference letters from former employers alleviate information frictions in a low-skill labor market, improving applicant screening and gender equity. A resume audit study finds that using a reference letter in the application increases callba...

The Rise of Working Mothers and the 1975 Earned Income Tax Credit

By Jacob Bastian

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2020

The rise of working mothers radically changed the US economy and the role of women in society. In one of the first studies of the 1975 introduction of the Earned Income Tax Credit, I find that this program increased maternal employment by 6 percent, repre...

Using Place-Based Jobs Policies to Help Distressed Communities

[Symposium: Place-Based Policies]

By Timothy J. Bartik

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2020

Place-based jobs policies seek to create jobs in particular local labor markets. Such policies include business incentives provided by state and local governments, which cost almost 50 billion USD annually. The most persuasive rationale for these polici...

The Long-Term Impacts of Grants on Poverty: Nine-Year Evidence from Uganda's Youth Opportunities Program

By Christopher Blattman, Nathan Fiala, and Sebastian Martinez

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2020

In 2008, Uganda gave 400 USD per person to thousands of young people to help them start skilled trades, work more, and raise incomes. Four years on, an experimental evaluation found grants raised work by 17 percent and earnings by 38 percent (Blattman, Fi...

Rage against the Machines: Labor-Saving Technology and Unrest in Industrializing England

By Bruno Caprettini and Hans-Joachim Voth

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2020

Can new technology cause social instability and unrest? We examine the famous "Captain Swing" riots in 1830s England. Newly collected data on threshing machine diffusion shows that labor-saving technology was associated with more riots. We instrument tech...

Explaining the Decline in the US Employment-to-Population Ratio: A Review of the Evidence

By Katharine G. Abraham and Melissa S. Kearney

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2020

This paper first documents trends in employment rates and then reviews what is known about the various factors that have been proposed to explain the decline in the overall employment-to-population ratio between 1999 and 2018. Population aging has had...

Policy Language and Information Effects in the Early Days of Federal Reserve Forward Guidance

By Kurt G. Lunsford

American Economic Review, September 2020

I show that the nature of the Federal Open Market Committee's (FOMC's) forward guidance language shapes the private sector's responses to monetary policy statements. From February 2000 to June 2003, the FOMC only gave forward guidance about economic outlo...