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...

Who Belongs? The Determinants of Selective Membership into the National Bureau of Economic Research

By Marieke Kleemans and Rebecca L. Thornton

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

We examine the determinants of membership into the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) using data from all tenured and tenure-track economists at R1 universities in the United States. We construct an annual panel of employment, research productivi...

Unemployment Insurance Generosity and Aggregate Employment

By Christopher Boone, Arindrajit Dube, Lucas Goodman, and Ethan Kaplan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2021

This paper examines the impact of unemployment insurance (UI ) on aggregate employment by exploiting cross-state variation in the maximum benefit duration during the Great Recession. Comparing adjacent counties located in neighboring states, there is no s...

Welfare generosity and work

[Research Highlight]

May 28, 2021

How much does extending unemployment insurance affect employment?

Making economic tools more reliable

[Research Highlight]

June 08, 2021

An interview with Isaiah Andrews, the 2021 John Bates Clark Medalist

LGBTQ economics

[Research Highlight]

June 17, 2021

Lee Badgett discusses her research on the effects of sexual orientation-based discrimination and how economists can engage in the fight for equality.

On Her Own Account: How Strengthening Women's Financial Control Impacts Labor Supply and Gender Norms

By Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Natalia Rigol, Simone Schaner, and Charity Troyer Moore

American Economic Review, July 2021

Can increasing control over earnings incentivize a woman to work, and thereby influence norms around gender roles? We randomly varied whether rural Indian women received bank accounts, training in account use, and direct deposit of public sector wages int...

School vs neighborhood effects

[Research Highlight]

July 15, 2021

Why quality schools matter

Informal Labor and the Efficiency Cost of Social Programs: Evidence from Unemployment Insurance in Brazil

By François Gerard and Gustavo Gonzaga

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

It is widely believed that the presence of a large informal sector increases the efficiency cost of social programs in developing countries. We evaluate such claims for the case of unemployment insurance (UI) by combining an optimal UI framework with co...

Wired and Hired: Employment Effects of Subsidized Broadband Internet for Low-Income Americans

By George W. Zuo

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2021

I present evidence on the relationship between broadband pricing and labor market outcomes for low-income individuals. Specifically, I estimate the effects of a Comcast service providing discounted broadband to qualifying low-income families. I use a trip...

The Long-Run Effects of Childhood Insurance Coverage: Medicaid Implementation, Adult Health, and Labor Market Outcomes

By Andrew Goodman-Bacon

American Economic Review, August 2021

This paper estimates the long-run effects of childhood Medicaid eligibility on adult health and economic outcomes using the program's original introduction (1966–1970) and its mandated coverage of welfare recipients. The design compares cohorts born in ...