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...

Reviving distressed communities

[Research Highlight]

September 09, 2020

Tim Bartik of the Upjohn Institute on how economic development policy is shortchanging poor regions.

Patronage and Selection in Public Sector Organizations

By Emanuele Colonnelli, Mounu Prem, and Edoardo Teso

American Economic Review, October 2020

In all modern bureaucracies, politicians retain some discretion in public employment decisions, which may lead to frictions in the selection process if political connections substitute for individual competence. Relying on detailed matched employer-employ...

E-governance, Accountability, and Leakage in Public Programs: Experimental Evidence from a Financial Management Reform in India

By Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Clément Imbert, Santhosh Mathew, and Rohini Pande

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

Can e-governance reforms improve government policy? By making information available on a real-time basis, information technologies may reduce the theft of public funds. We analyze a large field experiment and the nationwide scale-up of a reform to India's...

Job Displacement, Family Dynamics, and Spousal Labor Supply

By Martin Halla, Julia Schmieder, and Andrea Weber

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2020

We study the effectiveness of intrahousehold insurance among married couples when the husband loses his job due to a mass layoff or plant closure. Empirical results based on Austrian administrative data show that husbands suffer persistent employment and ...

The Migration Accelerator: Labor Mobility, Housing, and Demand

By Greg Howard

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2020

What is the role of migration in regional evolutions? I document that within-US migration causes a reduction in the unemployment rate of the receiving city over several years. To establish this causal effect, I construct an instrument using out-migration ...

The rise of the service economy

[Research Highlight]

October 16, 2020

Structural changes are reshaping growth, interest rates, and investment in the world’s economies.

Importing polarization

[Research Highlight]

October 26, 2020

Professor Gordon Hanson discusses how competition from China has pushed some communities to the edges of the political spectrum.

Devotion and economic progress

[Research Highlight]

November 16, 2020

How does religious intensity affect development?

Changing Business Dynamism and Productivity: Shocks versus Responsiveness

By Ryan A. Decker, John Haltiwanger, Ron S. Jarmin, and Javier Miranda

American Economic Review, December 2020

The pace of job reallocation has declined in the United States in recent decades. We draw insight from canonical models of business dynamics in which reallocation can decline due to (i) lower dispersion of idiosyncratic shocks faced by businesses, or (ii)...

Job Seekers' Perceptions and Employment Prospects: Heterogeneity, Duration Dependence, and Bias

By Andreas I. Mueller, Johannes Spinnewijn, and Giorgio Topa

American Economic Review, January 2021

This paper uses job seekers' elicited beliefs about job finding to disentangle the sources of the decline in job-finding rates by duration of unemployment. We document that beliefs have strong predictive power for job finding, but are not revised downward...