Perspectives on The Rise and Fall of American Growth

By Robert J. Gordon

American Economic Review, May 2016

This paper summarizes the book and assesses the reviews contained in the four contributed papers. Gregory Clark provides convincing arguments that extend the book's forecast that future technological change will be slower. Nicholas Crafts shows declining ...

The Rise and Fall of Disability Insurance Enrollment in the Netherlands

[Symposium: Disability Insurance]

By Pierre Koning and Maarten Lindeboom

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

As recently as 15 years ago, the high level of Disability Insurance (DI) enrollment was considered to be one of the major social and economic problems of the Netherlands; indeed, the Netherlands was characterized as the country with the most out-of-contro...

Liquidity Traps and Jobless Recoveries

By Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé and Martín Uribe

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2017

This paper proposes a model that explains the joint occurrence of liquidity traps and jobless growth recoveries. Its key elements are downward nominal wage rigidity, a Taylor-type interest rate feedback rule, the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates...

Employment, Wages, and Voter Turnout

By Kerwin Kofi Charles and Melvin Stephens Jr.

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2013

Using county-level data across several decades, and various OLS and TSLS models, we find that higher local wages and employment lower turnout in elections for governor, senator, US Congress and state House of Representatives, but have no effect on pres...

A Theory of Countercyclical Government Multiplier

By Pascal Michaillat

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2014

I develop a New Keynesian model in which a type of government multiplier doubles when unemployment rises from 5 percent to 8 percent. This multiplier indicates the additional number of workers employed when one worker is hired in the public sector. Gra...

Female Labor Supply: Why Is the United States Falling Behind?

By Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn

American Economic Review, May 2013

In 1990, the US had the sixth highest female labor participation rate among 22 OECD countries. By 2010 its rank had fallen to seventeenth. We find that the expansion of "family-friendly" policies, including parental leave and part-time work entitlements i...

The Economic Consequences of Family Policies: Lessons from a Century of Legislation in High-Income Countries

[Symposium: Women in the Labor Market]

By Claudia Olivetti and Barbara Petrongolo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2017

By the early 21st century, most high-income countries have put into effect a host of generous and virtually gender-neutral parental leave policies and family benefits, with the multiple goals of gender equity, higher fertility, and child development. Wh...

Job Ladders and Earnings of Displaced Workers

By Pawel Krolikowski

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2017

Workers who suffer job displacement experience surprisingly large and persistent earnings losses. This paper proposes an explanation for this robust empirical puzzle in a model of search with a significant job ladder and increased separation rates for the...

The Time-Varying NAIRU and Its Implications for Economic Policy

[Symposium: The Natural Rate of Unemployment]

By Robert J. Gordon

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

The NAIRU, the unemployment rate consistent with a constant rate of inflation, is estimated, in this paper, as a parameter allowed to vary over time. Value is determined in an econometric model where the inflation rate depends on its past values, demand a...

Long-Term Consequences of Vietnam-Era Conscription: New Estimates Using Social Security Data

By Joshua D. Angrist, Stacey H. Chen, and Jae Song

American Economic Review, May 2011

We use the draft lottery to construct instrumental variables (IV) estimates of the impact of Vietnam-era military service on veterans' Social Security (SSA) earnings through 2007. We also use SSA data to construct IV estimates for employment (as measured ...

Minimum Wages and Employment: A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania: Comment

By David Neumark and William Wascher

American Economic Review, December 2000

Crime, Inequality, and Unemployment

By Kenneth Burdett, Ricardo Lagos, and Randall Wright

American Economic Review, December 2003

The Fiscal Cost of Hurricanes: Disaster Aid versus Social Insurance

By Tatyana Deryugina

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2017

Little is known about the fiscal costs of natural disasters, especially regarding social safety nets that do not specifically target extreme weather events. This paper shows that US hurricanes lead to substantial increases in non-disaster government trans...

Schooling and the Vietnam-Era GI Bill: Evidence from the Draft Lottery

By Joshua D. Angrist and Stacey H. Chen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2011

Draft-lottery estimates of the causal effects of Vietnam-era military service using 2000 census data show marked schooling gains for veterans. We argue that these gains can be attributed to Vietnam veterans' use of the GI Bill rather than draft avoidance ...

Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation

[Symposium: Automation and Labor Markets]

By David H. Autor

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2015

In this essay, I begin by identifying the reasons that automation has not wiped out a majority of jobs over the decades and centuries. Automation does indeed substitute for labor—as it is typically intended to do. However, automation also comple...

Determinants of Callbacks to Job Applications: An Audit Study

By Henry S. Farber, Dan Silverman, and Till von Wachter

American Economic Review, May 2016

We summarize findings from an audit study investigating how unemployment duration, age, and holding a low-level "interim" job affect the likelihood that experienced college-educated females applying for administrative support jobs receive a callback from ...

Implications of the Labor Market for Graduate Education in Economics

By Anne O. Krueger

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 1999

The Siegfried-Stock findings represent the first solid data available since COGEE collected its data in the late 1980s. This paper reviews the COGEE findings in light of the new evidence. On the whole, the news is good: new Ph.D.s awarded are up, economic...

Structural Change in a Multisector Model of Growth

By L. Rachel Ngai and Christopher A. Pissarides

American Economic Review, March 2007

We study a multisector model of growth with differences in TFP growth rates across sectors and derive sufficient conditions for the coexistence of structural change, characterized by sectoral labor reallocation and balanced aggregate growth. The condition...

Disaster Risk and Business Cycles

By François Gourio

American Economic Review, October 2012

Motivated by the evidence that risk premia are large and countercyclical, this paper studies a tractable real business cycle model with a small risk of economic disaster, such as the Great Depression. An increase in disaster risk leads to a decline of em...

Immigrants, Productivity, and Labor Markets

[Symposium: Immigration and Labor Markets]

By Giovanni Peri

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2016

Immigration has been a steady force acting on population and employment within countries throughout human history. Focusing on the last four decades, we show that the mix of immigrants to rich countries has been, overall, rather balanced between college a...