Politics at Work

By Emanuele Colonnelli, Valdemar Pinho Neto, and Edoardo Teso

American Economic Review, October 2025

We study how individual political views shape firm behavior and labor market outcomes using new microdata from Brazil. We first show that business owners are considerably more likely to employ copartisan workers. This phenomenon is in part driven by the o...

A Matter of Time? Measuring Effects of Public Schooling Expansions on Families

By Chloe R. Gibbs, Jocelyn Wikle, and Riley Wilson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We leverage pronounced changes in the availability of public schooling for young children— through duration expansions to the kindergarten day—to better understand how an implicit childcare subsidy affects mothers and families. Exploiting full-day k...

Gender and the macroeconomy

[Research Highlight]

October 17, 2025

How has women's labor force participation shaped America's business cycles?

Changing Business Cycles: The Role of Women's Employment

By Stefania Albanesi

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

Women's labor force participation in the United States rose rapidly until the mid-1990s when it flattened out. I examine the impact of this change in trend on aggregate business cycles with a quantitative model that incorporates gender differences. I show...

Local Labor Market Effects of the 2002 Bush Steel Tariffs

By James Lake and Ding Liu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

President George W. Bush imposed safeguard tariffs on steel in early 2002. Using US input-output tables and a generalized difference-in-difference methodology, we analyze the local labor market employment effects of these tariffs depending on the local la...

Public Financing and Racial Disparities: Does a Rising Tide Always Lift All Boats?

By Tian Qiu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This paper studies the heterogeneous impact of local government spending across racial groups. An exogenous increase in spending results in significant improvement in White, but not Black or Hispanic, labor market outcomes such as employment rate, weekly ...

Do Medical Treatments Work for Work? Evidence from Breast Cancer Patients

By N. Meltem Daysal, William N. Evans, Mikkel Hasse Pedersen, and Mircea Trandafir

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

We investigate the effects of radiation therapy on the mortality and economic outcomes of breast cancer patients. We implement a 2SLS strategy within a difference-in-difference framework exploiting variation in treatment stemming from a medical guideline ...

Refugees’ Economic Integration

By Dany Bahar, Rebecca Brough, and Giovanni Peri

Journal of Economic Literature

Refugees are international migrants escaping persecution and crises, whose economic success in their countries of destination is threatened by lack of access to labor and credit markets, limited information on employment opportunities, and loss of human c...

The Impact of Unemployment Benefit Extensions on Employment: The 2014 Employment Miracle?

By Marcus Hagedorn, Iourii Manovskii, and Kurt Mitman

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2025

We measure the aggregate effect of unemployment benefit duration on employment and the labor force. We exploit the variation induced by Congress's failure in December 2013 to reauthorize the unprecedented benefit extensions introduced during the Great Rec...

Downward Rigidity in the Wage for New Hires

By Jonathon Hazell and Bledi Taska

American Economic Review, December 2025

Wage rigidity is an important explanation for unemployment fluctuations. In benchmark models wages for new hires are key, but there is limited evidence on this margin. We use wages posted on vacancies, with job and establishment information, to measure th...

Changing Income Risk across the US Skill Distribution: Evidence from a Generalized Kalman Filter

By J. Carter Braxton, Kyle Herkenhoff, Jonathan Rothbaum, and Lawrence Schmidt

American Economic Review, December 2025

For whom has earnings risk changed, and why? We answer these questions by combining the Kalman filter and EM algorithm to estimate persistent and temporary earnings for every individual at every point in time. We apply our method to administrative earning...

The effects of unemployment benefit duration

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What happened to the US labor market when the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Act expired after the Great Recession?

On-Demand Assistance: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia

By Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Sudarno Sumarto, Achmad Maulana, Vivi Alatas, and Elan Satriawan

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Given labor informality in developing countries, addressing employment shocks is challenging. We study Indonesia’s new approach for on-demand online applications for temporary cash assistance and online job training. Through 20 lotteries over two year...

Trade Protection Along Supply Chains

By Chad P. Bown, Paola Conconi, Aksel Erbahar, and Lorenzo Trimarchi

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We combine detailed information on US temporary trade barriers during 1989-2020 with input-output data to study the effects of trade protection along supply chains. We focus on measures imposed against China, which has been the main target of trade protec...

Technological spillovers

[Research Highlight]

November 04, 2025

Shawn Kantor and Alexander Whalley discuss the long-term effects of public R&D investment made during the Cold War–era space race.

Moonshot: Public R&D and Growth

By Shawn Kantor and Alexander Whalley

American Economic Review, September 2025

We estimate the long-term effect of public R&D on growth in manufacturing by analyzing new data from the Cold War–era space race. We develop a novel empirical strategy that leverages US-Soviet rivalry in space technology to isolate windfall R&D spending...

Childhood Health Shocks and the Intergenerational Transmission of Inequality

By Tine M. Eriksen, Amanda P. Gaulke, Jannet Svensson, Niels Skipper, and Peter R. Thingholm

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

This paper documents a socioeconomic gradient in adult labor market penalties stemming from a single chronic and treatable childhood health shock in a country with universal access to healthcare. Using childhood onset Type 1 Diabetes, Danish administrat...

2025 in Featured Charts

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Economists addressed issues related to policing, unemployment benefits, bank bailouts, and more.

From Deviations to Shortfalls: The Effects of the FOMC's New Employment Objective

By Brent Bundick and Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2026

We analyze the effects of a monetary policy that stabilizes "shortfalls" rather than "deviations" of employment from its maximum level. A shortfalls-stabilization rule leads to expectations of more accommodative policy in expansions, raising average infla...

2025 in Research Highlights

[Research Highlight]

December 16, 2025

Economists addressed issues related to automation, climate change, industrial policy, and more.