The German Model of Industrial Relations: Balancing Flexibility and Collective Action

[Symposium: Labor Market Institutions]

By Simon Jäger, Shakked Noy, and Benjamin Schoefer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

We give an overview of the "German model" of industrial relations. We organize our review by focusing on the two pillars of the model: sectoral collective bargaining and firm-level codetermination. Relative to the United States, Germany outsources colle...

Danish Flexicurity: Rights and Duties

[Symposium: Labor Market Institutions]

By Claus Thustrup Kreiner and Michael Svarer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2022

Denmark is one of the richest countries in the world and achieves this in combination with low inequality, low unemployment, and high-income security. This performance is often attributed to the Danish labor market model characterized by what has become...

Earnings Inequality and the Minimum Wage: Evidence from Brazil

By Niklas Engbom and Christian Moser

American Economic Review, December 2022

Increases in the minimum wage can substantially reduce earnings inequality. To demonstrate this, we combine administrative and survey data with an equilibrium model of the Brazilian labor market. We find that a 128 percent increase in the real minimum wag...

The Employee Costs of Corporate Debarment in Public Procurement

By Christiane Szerman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

This paper studies an anticorruption policy—corporate debarment, or blacklisting—to understand how disclosing illicit corporate practices and the sanctions for these practices affect firm and worker outcomes. Exploiting a policy change in Brazil that ...

Strategic Formal Layoffs: Unemployment Insurance and Informal Labor Markets

By Bernardus Van Doornik, David Schoenherr, and Janis Skrastins

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

Exploiting an unemployment insurance reform in Brazil, we study incentive effects of UI in the presence of informal labor markets. We find that eligibility for UI benefits increases formal layoffs by 11 percent. Most of the additional layoffs are related ...

The Effects of Working While in School: Evidence from Employment Lotteries

By Thomas Le Barbanchon, Diego Ubfal, and Federico Araya

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2023

Does working while in school smooth students' transition into the labor market? We provide evidence on this question by leveraging a one-year work-study program that randomized job offers among over 90,000 student applicants in Uruguay. Program rules forb...

Women, Wealth Effects, and Slow Recoveries

By Masao Fukui, Emi Nakamura, and Jón Steinsson

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2023

Business cycle recoveries have slowed in recent decades. This slow-down comes entirely from female employment, as women's employment rates converged toward men's during the past half-century. But does the slowdown in the growth of female employment rates ...

Teacher diversity in the classroom

[Research Highlight]

January 04, 2023

Does exposure to same-race teachers help students in the long run?

The Employment Effects of Countercyclical Public Investments

By Lukas Buchheim and Martin Watzinger

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

This paper estimates the causal impact of a sizable German public investment program on employment at the county level. The program focused on improving the energy efficiency of school buildings, making it possible to use the number of schools as an instr...

Employed in a SNAP? The Impact of Work Requirements on Program Participation and Labor Supply

By Colin Gray, Adam Leive, Elena Prager, Kelsey Pukelis, and Mary Zaki

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2023

Work requirements are common in US safety net programs. Evidence remains limited, however, on the extent to which work requirements increase economic self-sufficiency or screen out vulnerable individuals. Using linked administrative data on food stamps (S...

Natural Resource Booms, Human Capital, and Earnings: Evidence from Linked Education and Employment Records

By Alina Kovalenko

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2023

Using administrative panel data on the universe of Texas public school students, I analyze how shocks to local economic conditions affect education and employment decisions. I find that high school students at the bottom of the academic ability distributi...

The Effect of Population Aging on Economic Growth, the Labor Force, and Productivity

By Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen, and David Powell

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2023

Population aging is expected to slow US economic growth. We use variation in the predetermined component of population aging across states to estimate the impact of aging on growth in GDP per capita for 1980–2010. We find that each 10 percent increase i...

Self-Harming Trade Policy? Protectionism and Production Networks

By Alessandro Barattieri and Matteo Cacciatore

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2023

Using monthly data on temporary trade barriers (TTBs), we estimate the dynamic employment effects of protectionism through vertical production linkages. First, exploiting high-frequency data and TTB procedural details, we identify trade policy shocks exog...

The State-Dependent Effectiveness of Hiring Subsidies

By Sebastian Graves

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, April 2023

The responsiveness of job creation to shocks is procyclical, while the responsiveness of job destruction is countercyclical. This new finding can be explained by a heterogeneous-firm model in which hiring costs lead to lumpy employment adjustment. The mod...

The Costs of Job Displacement over the Business Cycle and Its Sources: Evidence from Germany

By Johannes F. Schmieder, Till von Wachter, and Jörg Heining

American Economic Review, May 2023

We document the sources behind the costs of job loss over the business cycle using administrative data from Germany. Losses in annual earnings after displacement are large, persistent, and highly cyclical, nearly doubling in size during downturns. A large...

The Wage Phillips Curve under Labor Market Power

By Anastasia Burya, Rui Mano, Yannick Timmer, and Anke Weber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Using the near universe of online vacancy postings in the United States, we explore linkages between labor market power and the trade-off between unemployment and wages. We estimate the Phillips curve at the commuting zone level and find that the relation...

Advanced Technology Adoption: Selection or Causal Effects?

By Daron Acemoglu, Gary Anderson, David Beede, Catherine Buffington, Eric Childress, Emin Dinlersoz, Lucia Foster, Nathan Goldschlag, John Haltiwanger, Zachary Kroff, Pascual Restrepo, and Nikolas Zolas

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

This paper uses data from the 2019 Annual Business Survey to document that firms adopting advanced technologies are larger in terms of employment than other firms in their same industry and cohort. Using data from the Longitudinal Business Survey, we show...

Robot Hubs: The Skewed Distribution of Robots in US Manufacturing

By Erik Brynjolfsson, Catherine Buffington, Nathan Goldschlag, J. Frank Li, Javier Miranda, and Robert Seamans

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We use establishment-level data from the US Census Bureau's Annual Survey of Manufactures to study the characteristics and geographic locations of investments in robots. We find that the distribution of robots is highly skewed across locations. Some locat...