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 ...

Productivity Shocks, Long-Term Contracts, and Earnings Dynamics

By Neele Balke and Thibaut Lamadon

American Economic Review, July 2022

This paper examines how employer- and worker-specific productivity shocks transmit to earnings and employment. We develop an equilibrium search model and characterize the optimal contract offered by firms. Risk-neutral firms provide partial insurance agai...

The Impact of Childhood Social Skills and Self-Control Training on Economic and Noneconomic Outcomes: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment Using Administrative Data

By Yann Algan, Elizabeth Beasley, Sylvana Côté, Jungwee Park, Richard E. Tremblay, and Frank Vitaro

American Economic Review, August 2022

A childhood intervention to improve the social skills and self-control of at-risk kindergarten boys in the 1980s had positive impacts over the life course: higher trust and self-control as adolescents; increased social group membership, education, and red...

The Human Side of Structural Transformation

By Tommaso Porzio, Federico Rossi, and Gabriella Santangelo

American Economic Review, August 2022

We document that nearly half of the global decline in agricultural employment was driven by new cohorts entering the labor market. A new dataset of policy reforms supports an interpretation of these cohort effects as human capital. Using a model of fricti...

Child Marriage Bans and Female Schooling and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from Natural Experiments in 17 Low- and Middle-Income Countries

By Nicholas Wilson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2022

I measure the effect of child marriage bans on female educational attainment and employment using a difference-in-differences approach employing subnational spatial and cohort variation in a sample of over 250,000 female respondents from 17 low- and middl...

Learning on the Job and the Cost of Business Cycles

By Karl Walentin and Andreas Westermark

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2022

We show that business cycles reduce welfare through a decrease in the average level of employment in a labor market search model with learning on the job and skill loss during unemployment. Empirically, unemployment and the job-finding rate are negatively...

Job Search and Hiring with Limited Information about Workseekers' Skills

By Eliana Carranza, Robert Garlick, Kate Orkin, and Neil Rankin

American Economic Review, November 2022

We assess South African workseekers' skills and disseminate the assessment results to explore how limited information affects firm and workseeker behavior. Giving workseekers assessment results that they can credibly share with firms increases workseekers...

Human Capital Depreciation and Returns to Experience

By Michael Dinerstein, Rigissa Megalokonomou, and Constantine Yannelis

American Economic Review, November 2022

Human capital can depreciate if skills are unused. But estimating human capital depreciation is challenging, as worker skills are difficult to measure and less productive workers are more likely to spend time in nonemployment. We overcome these challenges...

The Psychosocial Value of Employment: Evidence from a Refugee Camp

By Reshmaan Hussam, Erin M. Kelley, Gregory Lane, and Fatima Zahra

American Economic Review, November 2022

Employment may be important to well-being for reasons beyond its role as an income source. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value of employment in refugee camps in Bangladesh. We involve 745 individuals in a field experiment with ...

Protecting vulnerable kids

[Research Highlight]

August 18, 2022

Joseph Doyle discusses the history and economics of foster care in the United States.

Sadie T. M. Alexander: Black Women and a "Taste of Freedom in the Economic World"

By Nina Banks

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

The employment history of African American women is notable because of their higher labor force participation rates compared to other women in the US. This essay discusses Sadie T. M. Alexander's analysis of Black women and work based on her 1930s speec...