Explaining differences in the college wage premium across countries

[Research Highlight]

August 14, 2024

Do employment protection policies help buoy the wages of less educated workers relative to their more educated counterparts?

Broader economic impacts of the Paycheck Protection Program

[Research Highlight]

August 27, 2024

Brent Ambrose discusses the spillover effects of the PPP on the commercial real estate market.

Spending and Job-Finding Impacts of Expanded Unemployment Benefits: Evidence from Administrative Micro Data

By Peter Ganong, Fiona Greig, Pascal Noel, Daniel M. Sullivan, and Joseph Vavra

American Economic Review, September 2024

We show that the largest increase in unemployment benefits in US history had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts. This finding has three implications. First, increased benefits were important for explaining aggregate spending dynamics—b...

The Labor Market Impacts of Reducing Felony Convictions

By Amanda Agan, Andrew Garin, Dmitri Koustas, Alexandre Mas, and Crystal S. Yang

American Economic Review: Insights, September 2024

We study the labor market impacts of retroactively reducing felonies to misdemeanors in San Joaquin County, California, where criminal justice agencies implemented Proposition 47 reductions in a quasi-random order, without requiring input or action from a...

Temporary Employment in Markets with Frictions

By Tito Boeri and Pietro Garibaldi

Journal of Economic Literature, September 2024

Temporary employment has spiked in OECD countries over the last 40 years and is now a common feature of their labor market landscape. A large body of empirical literature examines the spread of temporary employment, but no systematic review and interpreta...

Unintended Consequences of Welfare Cuts on Children and Adolescents

By Christian Dustmann, Rasmus Landersø, and Lars Højsgaard Andersen

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2024

This paper studies the effects of a large welfare benefit reduction on the children in the affected families. The welfare cut targeted adult refugees who received residency in Denmark, and it reduced their disposable income by 30 percent on average over t...

Rising Top, Falling Bottom: Industries and Rising Wage Inequality

By John Haltiwanger, Henry R. Hyatt, and James R. Spletzer

American Economic Review, October 2024

Most of the rise in overall earnings inequality from 1996 to 2018 is accounted for by rising between-industry dispersion. The contribution of industries is right-skewed with the top 10 percent of four-digit NAICS industries dominating. The top 10 percent ...

A Simple Explanation of Countercyclical Uncertainty

By Joshua Bernstein, Michael Plante, Alexander W. Richter, and Nathaniel A. Throckmorton

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2024

This paper documents that labor search and matching frictions generate countercyclical uncertainty because the inherent nonlinearity in the flow of new matches makes employment uncertainty increasing in the number of people searching for work. Quantitativ...

Automation, Bargaining Power, and Labor Market Fluctuations

By Sylvain Leduc and Zheng Liu

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2024

We argue that the threat of automation weakens workers' bargaining power in wage negotiations, dampening wage adjustments and amplifying unemployment fluctuations. We make this argument based on a business cycle model with labor market search frictions, g...

Is There a Stable Relationship between Unemployment and Future Inflation?

By Terry Fitzgerald, Callum Jones, Mariano Kulish, and Juan Pablo Nicolini

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2024

Evaluating the stability of the Phillips curve using aggregate data is challenging due to the bias that endogenous monetary policy imparts on estimated Phillips curve coefficients. We argue that regional data can be used to identify the structural relatio...

Job search and unemployment insurance

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Do expanded unemployment benefits lower job-finding rates?

Information Frictions and Skill Signaling in the Youth Labor Market

By Sara B. Heller and Judd B. Kessler

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2024

This paper provides evidence that information frictions limit the labor market trajectories of US youth. We provide credible skill signals—recommendation letters based on supervisor feedback—to a random subset of 43,409 participants in New York's summ...

Origins of the 40-hour workweek

[Research Highlight]

November 01, 2024

How did workweek restrictions instituted during the Great Depression impact US labor markets?

Labor Market Effects of Workweek Restrictions: Evidence from the Great Depression

By Price Fishback, Chris Vickers, and Nicolas L. Ziebarth

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2024

We study the effects of restrictions on the length of the workweek under the President's Reemployment Agreement (PRA) of July 1933 and the National Industrial Recovery Act. We construct a model in which the equilibrium without such a workweek restriction ...

Assessing the Effects of the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act

[Research Highlight]

November 19, 2024

Eric Zwick discusses the impact of the TCJA on the tax code and the economy.

The Impact of Criminal Financial Sanctions: A Multistate Analysis of Survey and Administrative Data

By Keith Finlay, Matthew Gross, Carl Lieberman, Elizabeth Luh, and Michael Mueller-Smith

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2024

We estimate the impact of financial sanctions in the US criminal justice system, leveraging nine natural experiments in a regression discontinuity design framework across a diverse range of enforcement levels ($17–$6,000) and institutional environments....

Loans for the "Little Fellow": Credit, Crisis, and Recovery in the Great Depression

By Sarah Quincy

American Economic Review, December 2024

This paper identifies how bank branching benefited local economies during the Great Depression. Using archival data and narrative evidence, I show how Bank of America's branch network in 1930s California created an internal capital market that diversified...

The process of state building and long-run growth

[Research Highlight]

December 03, 2024

How did administrative reforms initiated during the French Revolution shape economic development over time?

2024 in Research Highlights

[Research Highlight]

December 17, 2024

Economists addressed issues related to economics publishing, congestion effects, bank runs, and more.

Singles, Couples, and Their Labor Supply: Long-Run Trends and Short-Run Fluctuations

By Jonna Olsson

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2025

Women's increased involvement in the economy has been an important change in labor markets during the past century. I show that a macroeconomic model taking into account gender and household composition in an otherwise parsimonious off-the-shelf setting c...