Effects of the COVID-19 Recession on the US Labor Market: Occupation, Family, and Gender

[Symposium: COVID-19]

By Stefania Albanesi and Jiyeon Kim

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2021

The economic crisis associated with the emergence of the novel corona virus is unlike standard recessions. Demand for workers in high contact and inflexible service occupations has declined while parental supply of labor has been reduced by lack of access...

Consolidation and productivity

[Research Highlight]

September 16, 2021

Should the United States be worried about its growing monopolies?

Migration Networks and Location Decisions: Evidence from US Mass Migration

By Bryan A. Stuart and Evan J. Taylor

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2021

This paper studies how birth town migration networks affected long-run location decisions during historical US migration episodes. We develop a new method to estimate the strength of migration networks for each receiving and sending location. Our estimate...

The long-run benefits of Medicaid

[Page]

Health insurance for minority children leads to better health and higher levels of employment.

Using Nonlinear Budget Sets to Estimate Extensive Margin Responses: Method and Evidence from the Earnings Test

By Alexander M. Gelber, Damon Jones, Daniel W. Sacks, and Jae Song

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

We estimate the impact of the Social Security Annual Earnings Test (AET) on older workers' employment. The AET reduces social security claimants' current benefits in proportion to their earnings in excess of an exempt amount. Using a regression kink desig...

Temperature, Labor Reallocation, and Industrial Production: Evidence from India

By Jonathan Colmer

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

To what degree can labor reallocation mitigate the economic consequences of weather-driven agricultural productivity shocks? I estimate that temperature-driven reductions in the demand for agricultural labor in India are associated with increases in nonag...

Teaching Labor Laws: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in South Africa

By Marianne Bertrand and Bruno Crépon

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2021

We assess whether imperfect knowledge of labor regulation hinders job creation at small and medium-sized firms. We partner with a labor law expert organization that provides information about labor regulation via newsletters and access to a specialized we...

Assortative Matching or Exclusionary Hiring? The Impact of Employment and Pay Policies on Racial Wage Differences in Brazil

By François Gerard, Lorenzo Lagos, Edson Severnini, and David Card

American Economic Review, October 2021

We measure the effects of firm policies on racial pay differences in Brazil. Non-Whites are less likely to be hired by high-wage firms, explaining about 20 percent of the racial wage gap for both genders. Firm-specific pay premiums for non-Whites are also...

Labor Rationing

By Emily Breza, Supreet Kaur, and Yogita Shamdasani

American Economic Review, October 2021

This paper measures excess labor supply in equilibrium. We induce hiring shocks—which employ 24 percent of the labor force in external month-long jobs—in Indian local labor markets. In peak months, wages increase instantaneously and local aggregate em...

Expanding broadband access

[Page]

How does high-speed internet affect the employment prospects of low-income Americans?

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...