Planning on the Potomac: A Review Essay on Jason E. Taylor's Deconstructing the Monolith: The Microeconomics of the National Industrial Recovery Act

By Joshua K. Hausman

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2021

Taylor (2019) details heterogeneity in the effects of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) across industries and across time. Through first the President's Reemployment Act (PRA) and then industry-specific "codes of fair competition," the NIRA rais...

Monetary Policy and Inequality under Labor Market Frictions and Capital-Skill Complementarity

By Juan J. Dolado, Gergő Motyovszki, and Evi Pappa

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2021

We provide a new channel through which monetary policy has distributional consequences at business cycle frequencies. We show that an unexpected monetary easing increases labor income inequality between high-skilled and less-skilled workers. To rationaliz...

Risk-Based Selection in Unemployment Insurance: Evidence and Implications

By Camille Landais, Arash Nekoei, Peter Nilsson, David Seim, and Johannes Spinnewijn

American Economic Review, April 2021

This paper studies whether adverse selection can rationalize a universal mandate for unemployment insurance (UI). Building on a unique feature of the unemployment policy in Sweden, where workers can opt for supplemental UI coverage above a minimum manda...

Connecting buyers and sellers in the countryside

[Research Highlight]

April 02, 2021

E-commerce development in rural China may not be as promising as many expected.

Free movement and labor markets

[Page]

A policy reform in Switzerland helped estimate the effect of foreign workers on native employment and wages.

Stock Market Wealth and the Real Economy: A Local Labor Market Approach

By Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Plamen T. Nenov, and Alp Simsek

American Economic Review, May 2021

We provide evidence of the stock market consumption wealth effect by using a local labor market analysis. An increase in local stock wealth driven by aggregate stock prices increases local employment and payroll in nontradable industries and in total, wit...

Migration and Labor Market Integration in Europe

[Symposium: European Union]

By David Dorn and Josef Zweimüller

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2021

The European labor market allows for the border-free mobility of workers across 31 countries that cover most of the continent's population. However, rates of migration across European countries remain considerably lower than interstate migration in the Un...

Initial Industry and Long-Term Earnings Growth

By Stephen L. Ross and Patralekha Ukil

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We test whether employment growth in a male worker's initial industry influences earnings growth using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We follow workers for 20 years after reporting their first industry, finding that lower employment growt...

The Distributional Impacts of Active Labor Market Programs for Indigenous Populations

By Donna Feir, Kelly Foley, and Maggie E. C. Jones

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We evaluate the distributional impacts of active labor market programming for indigenous peoples in Canada. Using administrative data and an empirical strategy that compares participants in high-intensity programs—skills interventions, job-creation part...

Field Specializations among Beginning Economists: Are There Gender Differences?

By Eva Sierminska and Ronald L. Oaxaca

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the process underlying field specialization among beginning economists. Our multivariate logit framework accommodates single- and dual-field specializations with correlated choices. Including field-specific relative salaries and expected probab...

Maintaining and Enhancing Labor Statistics during the COVID-19 Pandemic

By William W. Beach

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) continued to produce key employment statistics while reengineering operations as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In-person data collection moved to electronic, deadlines were adjusted, and flexibilities were impl...

Nominal Wage Adjustments during the Pandemic Recession

By John Grigsby, Erik Hurst, Ahu Yildirmaz, and Yulia Zhestkova

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

In this paper, we show that the pandemic recession has led to frequent cuts in nominal wages. Within three months in 2020, as many wage cuts had occurred as occurred throughout the Great Recession. Unlike employment declines, wage cuts were concentrated a...

Across the Universe: Policy Support for Employment and Revenue in the Pandemic Recession

By Ryan A. Decker, Robert J. Kurtzman, Byron F. Lutz, and Christopher J. Nekarda

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Using data from 14 government sources, we develop comprehensive estimates of US economic activity by sector, legal form of organization, and firm size to characterize how four government direct-lending programs—the Paycheck Protection Program, Main Stre...

Long-Term Employment Effects from Job Losses during the COVID-19 Crisis? A Comparison to the Great Recession and Its Slow Recovery

By Till von Wachter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

This paper compares predictions for the long-term reductions in the employment-to-population (EPOP) ratio based on estimates of the overall job-loss rate and the long-term effects of job loss with the actual evolution of the EPOP ratio. It took about ten ...

Disability Insurance in the Great Recession: Ease of Access, Program Enrollment, and Local Hysteresis

By Melissa S. Kearney, Brendan M. Price, and Riley Wilson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the interaction between Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) access and economic shocks during the Great Recession by exploiting exogenous variation in SSDI appeals processing time—a measure of hassle or access—between neighboring zi...

Wage Insurance and Labor Market Trajectories

By Benjamin G. Hyman, Brian K. Kovak, Adam Leive, and Theodore Naff

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Wage insurance provides income support to displaced workers who find reemployment at a lower wage. We study the effects of the wage insurance provisions of the US Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program using administrative data from the state of Virgin...

Custom Elections and Local Policies: The Case of Canada's First Nations

By Fernando M. Aragón and Anke S. Kessler

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the effect of community-designed electoral codes on Canadian First Nation communities. Adopting a custom code for local elections allows for changes such as increasing term duration, creating appeal and supervisory bodies, and incorporating tra...

Keynesian Production Networks and the COVID-19 Crisis: A Simple Benchmark

By David Baqaee and Emmanuel Farhi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The COVID-19 crisis is a seemingly all-encompassing shock to supply and demand. These negative shocks affected industries differently: some switched to remote work, maintaining employment and production, while others reduced capacity and shed workers. We ...

COVID-19 Is a Persistent Reallocation Shock

By Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis, and Brent H. Meyer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

Drawing on data from the firm-level Survey of Business Uncertainty, we present three pieces of evidence that COVID-19 is a persistent reallocation shock. First, rates of excess job and sales reallocation over 24-month periods (looking back 12 months and a...

Immigration Enforcement and the Hiring of Low-Skilled Labor

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes, Esther Arenas-Arroyo, and Bernhard Schmidpeter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine how firms adjust their labor demand to immigration policy changes resulting from intensified interior immigration enforcement. Using the temporal and geographic variation in the adoption of such policies as a source of identification, we find t...