Labor Market Responses to Unemployment Insurance: The Role of Heterogeneity

By Serdar Birinci and Kurt See

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We document considerable scope of heterogeneity within the unemployed, especially when they are divided along eligibility for and receipt of unemployment insurance (UI). We study the implications of this heterogeneity on UI's insurance-incentive trade-off...

Macroeconomic Implications of Uniform Pricing

By Diego Daruich and Julian Kozlowski

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We compile a new database of grocery prices in Argentina. We find uniform pricing both within and across regions—i.e., prices almost do not vary within the stores of a chain. In line with uniform pricing, prices in stores of chains operating in one regi...

The Macroeconomic Impact of Europe's Carbon Taxes

By Gilbert E. Metcalf and James H. Stock

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2023

We estimate the macroeconomic impacts of carbon taxes on GDP and employment growth rates using 30 years of data on carbon taxation in various European countries. We find no evidence for a negative impact on employment or GDP growth but rather find a zero ...

Working for References

By Samuel Häfner and Curtis R. Taylor

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2023

We analyze the incentive and welfare consequences of job references in a large economy marked by moral hazard, limited liability, exogenous job separation, and structural unemployment. In the firm-optimal equilibrium, employers provide references whenever...

The Unequal Consequences of Job Loss across Countries

By Antoine Bertheau, Edoardo Maria Acabbi, Cristina Barceló, Andreas Gulyas, Stefano Lombardi, and Raffaele Saggio

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2023

We document the consequences of losing a job across countries using a harmonized research design applied to seven matched employer-employee datasets. Workers in Denmark and Sweden experience the lowest earnings declines following job displacement, while w...

Who Runs the AEA?

By Kevin D. Hoover and Andrej Svorenčík

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2023

The leadership structure of the American Economic Association is documented using a biographical database covering every officer and losing candidate for AEA offices from 1950 to 2019. The analysis focuses on institutional affiliations by education and em...

Learning the language

[Research Highlight]

September 01, 2023

Blake Heller discusses the impact of adult English language training programs on immigrant earnings and civic engagement.

A Signal to End Child Marriage: Theory and Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh

By Nina Buchmann, Erica Field, Rachel Glennerster, Shahana Nazneen, and Xiao Yu Wang

American Economic Review, October 2023

Child marriage remains common even where female schooling and employment opportunities have grown. We experimentally evaluate a financial incentive to delay marriage alongside a girls' empowerment program in Bangladesh. While girls eligible for two years ...

The Effect of Hospital Postpartum Care Regulations on Breastfeeding and Maternal Time Allocation

By Emily C. Lawler and Katherine G. Yewell

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2023

We study the effects of state hospital regulations intended to increase breastfeeding by requiring certain standards of care during the immediate postpartum hospital stay. We find that these regulations significantly increased breastfeeding initiation by ...

Schooling, Skill Demand, and Differential Fertility in the Process of Structural Transformation

By T. Terry Cheung

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

Demography and structural transformation are interrelated, and depend critically on education. At the turn of the twentieth century, US parents began having fewer children while increasing educational investment per child. This quantity-quality tradeoff f...

Taxation of Consumption and Labor Income: A Quantitative Approach

By Francesca Parodi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2023

I quantitatively characterize optimal consumption and labor income taxes in a structural life-cycle model of household consumption, saving, and employment choices that allows for irreversibility of durable goods and preference heterogeneity. I find that d...

Age Discrimination across the Business Cycle

By Gordon B. Dahl and Matthew Knepper

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

We test whether age discrimination rises during recessions using two complementary analyses. Confidential EEOC microdata reveal that age-related firing and hiring charges rise by 3.3 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively, for each percentage point increas...

Do Credit Supply Shocks Affect Employment in Middle-Income Countries?

By Emilio Gutierrez, David Jaume, and Martín Tobal

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

This paper studies the effect of bank credit supply shocks on formal employment in Mexico using a proprietary dataset containing information on all loans extended to firms by commercial banks during 2010–2015. We find large impacts on the formal employm...

Moved to Poverty? A Legacy of the Apartheid Experiment in South Africa

By Bladimir Carrillo, Carlos Charris, and Wilman Iglesias

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2023

During the South African apartheid, Black people were forced to move to homelands during the 1960s and 1970s, resulting in one of history's largest segregation policy experiments. We examine how and why relocation to the homelands affected human capital a...

Shifting to work from home

[Research Highlight]

November 14, 2023

How did work-from-home arrangements in the United States evolve during and after the pandemic?

More than a paycheck

[Research Highlight]

August 17, 2018

The AEA interviews Stephan Meier about the nonmonetary rewards of work.

The Impact of Host Language Proficiency on Migrants' Employment Outcomes

By Lukas Schmid

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2023

This paper estimates the economic gains from proficiency in the host country's language on migrants' employment outcomes by exploiting the exogenous placement of refugees to Swiss cantons and a sharp language border dividing German- and French-speaking re...

Dishonesty and Public Employment

By Guillermo Cruces, Martín A. Rossi, and Ernesto Schargrodsky

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2023

We exploit a natural experiment to study the causal link between dishonest behavior and public employment. When military conscription was mandatory in Argentina, eligibility was determined by both a lottery and a medical examination. To avoid conscription...

Global trade and unionization

[Research Highlight]

December 01, 2023

What role did the surge in China imports have on already declining union rates?