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?

Increasing the Cost of Informal Employment: Evidence from Mexico

By Brenda Samaniego de la Parra and León Fernández Bujanda

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

We estimate the effect of increasing the cost of informal jobs on formal firms' and workers' outcomes. We combine administrative records and household surveys and exploit exogenous variation in the cost of informality generated by over 480,000 random work...

Reversing the Resource Curse: Foreign Corruption Regulation and the Local Economic Benefits of Resource Extraction

By Hans B. Christensen, Mark Maffett, and Thomas Rauter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

We examine how foreign corruption regulation affects the economic benefits communities receive from extraction activities in the resource-rich areas of Africa. After a mid-2000s increase in enforcement of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), night...

Wage Rigidity and Employment Outcomes: Evidence from Administrative Data

By Gabriel Ehrlich and Joshua Montes

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

This paper examines the relationship between downward nominal wage rigidity and employment outcomes using linked employer-employee data. Wage rigidity prevents 27.1 percent of counterfactual wage cuts, with a standard deviation of 19.2 percent across esta...

A Congestion Theory of Unemployment Fluctuations

By Yusuf Mercan, Benjamin Schoefer, and Petr Sedláček

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

We propose a theory of unemployment fluctuations in which new hires and incumbent workers are imperfect substitutes. Hence, attempts to hire away the unemployed during recessions diminish the marginal product of new hires, discouraging job creation. This ...

The Impact of Extending Employment Protection to Agency Workers on Firms

By Alejandro Micco and Pablo Muñoz

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

We study the impact of a reform that extended employment protection to temporary agency workers. Using a difference-in-difference research design, we show that plants more exposed to the regulation experienced a decrease in revenues and total employment, ...

Firms' Precautionary Savings and Employment during a Credit Crisis

By Davide Melcangi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

Can the macroeconomic effects of credit supply shocks be large even when a small share of firms is credit constrained? I use UK firm-level accounting data to discipline a heterogeneous-firm model where the interaction between real and financial frictions ...

Assessing the Stabilizing Effects of Unemployment Benefit Extensions

By Alexey Gorn and Antonella Trigari

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

We study the stabilizing role of benefit extensions. We develop a tractable quantitative model with heterogeneous agents, search frictions, and nominal rigidities. The model allows for a stabilizing aggregate demand channel and a destabilizing labor marke...

Scarred Consumption

By Ulrike Malmendier and Leslie Sheng Shen

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

We show that prior lifetime experiences can "scar" consumers. Consumers who have lived through times of unemployment exhibit persistent pessimism about their future financial situation and spend significantly less years later, controlling for income, empl...

New Perspectives on the Economics of Mental Health

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New Perspectives on the Economics of Mental Health Grand Hyatt, Texas Ballroom Salon E Chair: Janet Currie (Princeton University) Authors: Maya Rossin-Slater (Stanford University), Molly Kathleen Schnell (Northwestern University) (presenting), Hannes Schwandt (Northwestern University), Janet Currie (Princeton University) (presenting), W. Bentley MacLeod (Princeton University and NBER), Linda Ouyang (Princeton University), Gabriella Conti (University College London) (presenting), Sören Kliem (Criminological Research Institute of Lower Saxony), Malte Sandner (Institute for Employment Research) Discussants: Prashant Bhardawaj (University of California-San Diego), Amitabh Chandra (Harvard University), Janet Currie (Princeton University)