Immigration and Labor Market (Mis)perceptions

By Nicolás Ajzenman, Patricio Dominguez, and Raimundo Undurraga

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Exposure to immigrants often triggers sentiments of hostility and backlash among native-born populations. Among the main concerns identified by surveys, labor market conditions typically rank at the top. We combine a two-way fixed effects model with a Bar...

Estimating the Disparate Cumulative Impact of the Pandemic in Administrative Unemployment Insurance Data

By Alex Bell, T. J. Hedin, Peter Mannino, Roozbeh Moghadam, Carl Romer, Geoffrey C. Schnorr, and Till von Wachter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

To better measure the full extent of the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on workers and the labor market, this paper estimates three measures of the cumulative impact of the pandemic on workers across intensive and extensive margins using longitudinal admin...

Early Withdrawal of Pandemic Unemployment Insurance: Effects on Employment and Earnings

By Kyle Coombs, Arindrajit Dube, Calvin Jahnke, Raymond Kluender, Suresh Naidu, and Michael Stepner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We examine the effects of the sudden withdrawal of expanded pandemic unemployment benefits in June 2021 using anonymized bank transaction data for 16,253 individuals receiving unemployment insurance (UI) in April 2021. Comparing the difference-in-differen...

Equity in Unemployment Insurance Benefit Access

By Christopher J. O'Leary, William E. Spriggs, and Stephen A. Wandner

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We investigate the uneven pattern of access to unemployment insurance (UI) by age, gender, race, and ethnicity across the United States. We present results from a descriptive analysis using publicly available data reported by states over time on rates of ...

Gendered Impacts of COVID-19 in Developing Countries

By Titan Alon, Matthias Doepke, Kristina Manysheva, and Michèle Tertilt

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In many high-income economies, the COVID-19 recession has resulted in unprecedented declines in women's employment. We examine how the forces that underlie this observation play out in developing countries. A force affecting high- and low-income countries...

Black-Owned Firms, Financial Constraints, and the Firm Size Gap

By J. David Brown, John S. Earle, Mee Jung Kim, Kyung Min Lee, and Jared Wold

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We document the smaller average employment size and lower financial access of Black-owned businesses compared to White-owned businesses. Controlling for other characteristics, we find that observed differences in finance account for 60 percent of the 11.3...

Youth Hiring and Labor Market Tightness

By Eliza C. Forsythe

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

It is well-known that recessions can lead to long-term scarring for young workers. I show that employers hire fewer young workers when there are few job openings per unemployed job seeker, while hiring rates for workers with more than 10 years of potentia...

Soft Skills in the Youth Labor Market

By Sara B. Heller and Judd B. Kessler

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

This paper provides new descriptive evidence about which soft skills employers value in young, entry-level workers. We ran employer surveys as part of an experiment to generate letters of recommendation for New York City's Summer Youth Employment Program ...

What's in a Job? Evaluating the Effect of Private Sector Employment Experience on Student Academic Outcomes

By Alicia Sasser Modestino, Urbashee Paul, and Joseph McLaughlin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Although subsidized summer jobs programs have been shown to improve youth outcomes, little is known about the effects of private sector employment experiences. We study a unique program that brokers employer-paid summer internships for youth across a vari...

Income Declines during COVID-19

By Jeff Larrimore, Jacob Mortenson, and David Splinter

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

The COVID-19 recession caused regressive market income changes in the United States, with large losses more frequent than during the Great Recession and more concentrated at the bottom of the distribution. Progressive taxes and transfers, especially from ...

Women's Employment and Empowerment: Descriptive Evidence

By Madeline McKelway

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

It is widely believed that female employment and empowerment are intimately related. This paper presents relationships between women's employment and various measures of their empowerment, using data from rural India. The measures capture several dimensio...

Unemployment Insurance Financing as a Uniform Payroll Tax

By Sebastian Graves, Jonathon Hazell, Walker F. Lewis, and Christina Patterson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In the United States, unemployment insurance (UI) is financed by taxes levied on employers. We develop a model to decompose UI taxes into a firing tax component levied on firms that lay off workers, and a uniform payroll tax component levied on all firms ...

Poor Performance as a Predictable Outcome: Financing the Administration of Unemployment Insurance

By Marta Lachowska, Alexandre Mas, and Stephen A. Woodbury

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Effective administration of unemployment insurance (UI) is central to its ability to smooth consumption and act as an automatic stabilizer. The federal government's method of allocating funds to administer UI gives the states no incentive to provide quali...

Would Broadening the UI Tax Base Help Low-Income Workers?

By Mark Duggan, Audrey Guo, and Andrew C. Johnston

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Unemployment insurance (UI) tax bases vary significantly in the United States, from a low of $7,000 annually in California to a high of $52,700 in Washington. Previous research has provided surprisingly little guidance regarding the consequences of this v...

Should We Have Automatic Triggers for Unemployment Benefit Duration and How Costly Would They Be?

By Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Peter Ganong, and Jonathan Gruber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We model automatic trigger policies for unemployment insurance by simulating a weekly panel of individual labor market histories, grouped by state. We reach three conclusions: (i) policies designed to trigger immediately at the onset of a recession result...

Integration Costs and Missing Women in Firms around the World

By Conrad Miller, Jennifer Peck, and Mehmet Seflek

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Where social norms favor gender segregation, firms may find it costly to employ both men and women. If the costs of integration are largely fixed, firms will integrate only if their expected number of female employees under integration exceeds some thresh...

Persistent Monetary Policy in a Model with Labor Market Frictions

By Roman Goncharenko and Elizaveta Lukmanova

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

In a basic New Keynesian DSGE model with involuntary unemployment and inflation target shocks, we study the role of labor markets in the transmission of persistent monetary policy shocks that increase households' inflation expectations. The model predicts...

Monetary Policy, Labor Market, and Sectoral Heterogeneity

By Aarti Singh, Jacek Suda, and Anastasia Zervou

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We study the effects of monetary policy on the labor market across different sectors. We find that the employment response is stronger for firms in manufacturing and construction relative to firms in services. The result also holds within small and large ...

Self-Employment and Migration: Evidence from Mexico

By Alejandro Gutierrez-Li

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Mexico has one of the highest self-employment rates in the OECD. I study the relationship between business ownership and migration from Mexico to the United States using longitudinal data from the Mexican Migration Project (MMP). I find that the self-empl...

Explaining Heterogeneity in Use of Non-wage Benefits: The Role of Worker and Firm Characteristics in Disability Accommodations

By Naoki Aizawa, Corina Mommaerts, and Stephanie Rennane

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

Non-wage benefits are an important component of employment arrangements, but are not available to or used by all workers. Do differences in firm, worker, or match-specific characteristics drive benefit take-up? We provide new evidence on heterogeneity in ...