Informational barriers to hiring

[Page]

Can teaching small businesses about labor laws boost employment?

The Effects of DNA Databases on the Deterrence and Detection of Offenders

By Anne Sofie Tegner Anker, Jennifer L. Doleac, and Rasmus Landersø

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

This paper studies the effects of adding criminal offenders to a DNA database. Using a large expansion of Denmark's DNA database, we find that DNA registration reduces recidivism within the following year by up to 42 percent. It also increases the probabi...

The US Pretrial System: Balancing Individual Rights and Public Interests

[Symposium: Criminal Justice]

By Will Dobbie and Crystal S. Yang

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2021

In this article, we review a growing empirical literature on the effectiveness and fairness of the US pretrial system and discuss its policy implications. Despite the importance of this stage of the criminal legal process, researchers have only recently...

Long-Term Effects of the Targeting the Ultra Poor Program

By Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Garima Sharma

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2021

This paper studies the long-run effects of a "big-push" program providing a large asset transfer to the poorest Indian households. In a randomized controlled trial that follows these households over ten years, we find positive effects on consumption (0.6 ...

Work and childcare during the pandemic

[Research Highlight]

August 27, 2021

Stefania Albanesi discusses the effects of the COVID-19 recession on the US labor market.

Employment Structure and the Rise of the Modern Tax System

By Anders Jensen

American Economic Review, January 2022

This paper builds a new microdatabase that covers 100 countries at all income levels and long-run time series in the United States (1870–2010) and Mexico (1960–2010) to document how the modern tax system arises over development. I establish a new set ...

Offshoring, Automation, Low-Skilled Immigration, and Labor Market Polarization

By Federico S. Mandelman and Andrei Zlate

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2022

We show that the observed polarization of employment toward the high- and low-skill occupations disappears when only native workers are considered. Instead, low-skilled immigration explains employment growth at the low tail of the skill distribution. More...

Endogenous Separations, Wage Rigidities, and Unemployment Volatility

By Mikael Carlsson and Andreas Westermark

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2022

We show that in microdata, as well as in a search and matching model with flexible wages for new hires, wage rigidities of incumbent workers have substantial effects on separations and unemployment volatility. Allowing for an empirically relevant degree o...

The Cyclical Behavior of Unemployment and Wages under Information Frictions

By Camilo Morales-Jiménez

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2022

I propose a new mechanism for sluggish wages based on workers' noisy information about the state of the economy. Wages do not respond immediately to a positive aggregate shock because workers do not (yet) have enough information to demand higher wages. Th...

Collateral Shocks

By Yvan Becard and David Gauthier

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2022

We estimate a macroeconomic model on US data where banks lend to households and businesses and simultaneously adjust lending requirements on the two types of loans. We find that the collateral shock, a change in the ability of the financial sector to rede...

How Sticky Wages in Existing Jobs Can Affect Hiring

By Mark Bils, Yongsung Chang, and Sun-Bin Kim

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2022

We consider a matching model of employment with flexible wages for new hires but sticky wages within matches. Unlike most models of sticky wages, we allow effort to respond if wages are too high or too low. In the Mortensen-Pissarides model, employment is...

2021 in Research Highlights

[Research Highlight]

December 14, 2021

Economists addressed the recovery of Southern wealth after the Civil War, why the United States has the best research universities, Facebook filters, and more.

Removing Welfare Traps: Employment Responses in the Finnish Basic Income Experiment

By Jouko Verho, Kari Hämäläinen, and Ohto Kanninen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2022

This paper provides evidence that replacing minimum unemployment benefits with a basic income of equal size has minor employment effects at best. We examine an experiment in Finland in which 2,000 benefit recipients were randomized to receive a monthly ba...

Labor Productivity Growth and Industrialization in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Margaret McMillan and Albert Zeufack

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Manufacturing has made an important contribution to raising living standards in many parts of the world. Concerns about premature deindustrialization have made some observers skeptical about the potential for manufacturing to play this role in Africa. B...

Young Adults and Labor Markets in Africa

[Symposium: Economies of Africa]

By Oriana Bandiera, Ahmed Elsayed, Andrea Smurra, and Céline Zipfel

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2022

Every year, millions of young adults join the labor market in Africa. This paper harmonizes surveys and censuses from 68 low- and middle-income countries to compare their job prospects to those of their counterparts in other low-income regions. We show th...

Quarters vs. semesters

[Research Highlight]

February 09, 2022

How does switching to a different academic calendar impact students?

Risk Exposure and Acquisition of Macroeconomic Information

By Christopher Roth, Sonja Settele, and Johannes Wohlfart

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2022

We conduct an experiment with a representative sample from the United States to study households' demand for macroeconomic information. Respondents who learn of a higher personal exposure to unemployment risk during recessions increase their demand for an...

Designing Deadlines

By Erik Madsen

American Economic Review, March 2022

I study how an organization should manage a project of uncertain scope, when it is advised by a privately informed expert who prefers to prolong his employment. The optimal long-term contract combines a deadline for project completion and incentive paymen...

Basic income and welfare traps

[Page]

Can replacing unemployment benefits with a basic income boost employment?

Looking Back at 50 Years of the Clean Air Act

By Joseph E. Aldy, Maximilian Auffhammer, Maureen Cropper, Arthur Fraas, and Richard Morgenstern

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2022

We synthesize and review retrospective analyses of federal air quality regulations to examine the contributions of the Clean Air Act (CAA) to the vast air quality improvements seen since 1970. Geographic heterogeneity in stringency affects emissions, publ...