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...

The Local Labor Market Effects of Modern Manufacturing Capital: Evidence from France

By Philippe Aghion, Celine Antonin, Simon Bunel, and Xavier Jaravel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Using an event study methodology and comprehensive micro data from the French manufacturing sector, we analyze the local labor market effects of investments in modern manufacturing capital, including modern automation technologies. We estimate that commut...

Robots and Female Employment in German Manufacturing

By Liuchun Deng, Steffen Müller, Verena Plümpe, and Jens Stegmaier

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We analyze the impact of robot adoption on female employment. Our analysis is based on novel micro data on robot use by German manufacturing establishments linked with social security records. An event study analysis for robot adoption shows increased chu...

Measuring Business Trends and Outlook through a New Survey

By Catherine Buffington, Lucia Foster, and Colin Shevlin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

The Census Bureau's new Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS) provides timely information from businesses on their current trends and expectations over core concepts such as prices, employment, and revenue. The BTOS collects qualitative information in...

Payroll Employment at the Weekly Frequency

By Tomaz Cajner, Leland D. Crane, Ryan A. Decker, Adrian Hamins-Puertolas, and Christopher Kurz

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Nontraditional data can provide critical economic insights in real time. We document the development of weekly employment indexes based on microdata from the payroll processor ADP. These data have provided insights into labor market developments in the fa...

Are Business Applications Early Economic Indicators?

By Jose Asturias, Emin Dinlersoz, John Haltiwanger, and Rebecca Hutchinson

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Are business applications early indicators of economic activity? Our analysis indicates that monthly year-over-year growth in applications for likely employer businesses significantly leads growth in total nonfarm employment and has a positive correlation...

Knowledge about Federal Employment Nondiscrimination Protections on the Basis of Sexual Orientation

By Billur Aksoy, Christopher S. Carpenter, and Dario Sansone

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Using a US nationally representative online sample, we measure the level of knowledge on employment nondiscrimination laws. Although Americans are well informed about sex, race, and disability being protected characteristics, only about 71 percent think t...

Distributional Impacts of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement

By Brian K. Kovak and Peter M. Morrow

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We examine the effects of the 1988 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) on employment and earnings inequality among low-, medium-, and high-income Canadian workers initially employed in manufacturing. Although the FTA tariff cuts drove large changes in tr...

Labor Mobility and Unemployment over the Business Cycle

By Andrea Foschi, Christopher L. House, Christian Proebsting, and Linda L. Tesar

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

We estimate the responsiveness of net labor migration to regional differences in unemployment rates across the United States since the mid-1970s. Our baseline estimate suggests an elasticity of roughly -0.3. For typical labor force participation ratios, a...

The Self-Employment Effects of Secure Communities in the United States

By Raffi E. García and Alejandro Gutiérrez-Li

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2023

Illegal immigration has increased substantially in recent years. In this paper, we analyze how Secure Communities (SC), a major internal immigration enforcement program, affected self-employment participation and income in the United States between 2008 a...

Presidential Address: Does Monetary Policy Matter? The Narrative Approach after 35 Years

By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer

American Economic Review, June 2023

The narrative approach to macroeconomic identification uses qualitative sources, such as newspapers or government records, to provide information that can help establish causal relationships. This paper discusses the requirements for rigorous narrative ...

Do Technological Improvements in the Manufacturing Sector Raise or Lower Employment?

By Yongsung Chang and Jay H. Hong

American Economic Review, March 2006

We find that technology's effect on employment varies greatly across manufacturing industries. Some industries exhibit a temporary reduction in employment in response to a permanent increase in TFP, whereas many more industries exhibit an employment incre...