Across-Country Wage Compression in Multinationals

By Jonas Hjort, Xuan Li, and Heather Sarsons

American Economic Review, January 2026

Many employers link wages at establishments outside of the home region to the level at headquarters. We show this using new data on 1,200 multinationals' establishments across the world and linked employee-level data on their establishments in Brazil. Hea...

Gender-Biased Technological Change: Milking Machines and the Exodus of Women from Farming

By Philipp Ager, Marc Goñi, and Kjell G. Salvanes

American Economic Review, January 2026

This paper studies how gender-biased technological change in agriculture affected women's work in twentieth-century Norway. In the 1950s, dairy farms began widely adopting milking machines to replace milking cows by hand, a task typically performed by you...

The Option Value of Municipal Liquidity

By Andrew Haughwout, Benjamin Hyman, and Or Shachar

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

States and localities are relied upon to implement macroeconomic stabilization policies and ensure service delivery in times of crisis. In April 2020, the introduction of the Municipal Liquidity Facility (MLF) added an emergency lending instrument to th...

Can You Erase the Mark of a Criminal Record? Labor Market Impacts of Criminal Record Remediation

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

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

We investigate whether removing a previously-obtained criminal record improves employment outcomes. We estimate the causal impact of criminal record remediation laws that have been widely enacted with the goal of improving employment opportunities for ...

Lovepreet Singh on public spending and long-run growth

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How do public spending and investment impact the development of regional economies?

Naixin Zhang on the politics of industrial policy

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How does the political power of congressional representatives affect the allocation of industrial policies?

Labor Market Power: From Micro Evidence to Macro Consequences

[Symposium: Competition in Labor Markets]

By David Berger, Kyle Herkenhoff, and Simon Mongey

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2026

The traditional theoretical and empirical "micro approach" to studying labor market power (or monopsony) requires that firms are small and atomistic. This is at odds with the reality of labor markets in which monopsony potentially matters most. Empiricall...

The Effect of Low-Skill Immigration Restrictions On U.S. Firms and Workers: Evidence from a Randomized Lottery

By Michael A. Clemens and Ethan G. Lewis

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

U.S. firms hiring foreign workers in low-skill nonfarm jobs face a binding quota on the ‘H- 2B’ visa, allocated in part through a randomized lottery. We evaluate the quota’s marginal impact using the lottery, a novel firm survey, and a pre-analysi...

Do Workfare Programs Live Up to Their Promises? Experimental Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire

By Marianne Bertrand, Bruno Crépon, Alicia Marguerie, and Patrick Premand

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We study contemporaneous and post-program impacts of a public works program, which provides urban youth seven months of employment at the formal minimum wage with complementary training on entrepreneurship or job search. During the program, we find limi...

Racial and Ethnic Inequality and the China Shock

By Lisa B. Kahn, Lindsay Oldenski, and Geunyong Park

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy

Minority workers tend to be disproportionately harmed by negative economic shocks. Indeed, we show that Hispanic populations experienced worse employment losses due to import competition from China, relative to whites, largely due to lower education le...

Disemployment Effects of Unemployment Insurance: A Meta-analysis

By Jonathan P. Cohen and Peter Ganong

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2026

We systematically review studies of how unemployment benefits affect unemployment duration. Statistically significant findings are eight times more likely to be published. Correcting for publication bias cuts the average elasticity by a third. Meta-analys...

IT and Urban Polarization

By Jan Eeckhout, Christoph Hedtrich, and Roberto Pinheiro

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2026

We show that differential IT investment across cities has been a key driver of job and wage polarization since the 1990s. Using a novel dataset, we establish two stylized facts: IT investment is highest in firms in large and expensive cities, and the decl...

Temporary Layoffs, Loss-of-Recall, and Cyclical Unemployment Dynamics

By Mark Gertler, Christopher Huckfeldt, and Antonella Trigari

American Economic Review, March 2026

We revisit the role of temporary layoffs in the business cycle. While some have emphasized a stabilizing effect due to recall hiring, we quantify from the data an important countercyclical destabilizing effect due to "loss-of-recall," whereby workers in t...

Why Is Workplace Sexual Harassment Underreported? The Value of Outside Options amid the Threat of Retaliation

By Gordon B. Dahl and Matthew Knepper

American Economic Review, March 2026

Why is workplace sexual harassment chronically underreported? We hypothesize that employers coerce victims into silence through the threat of a retaliatory firing. To test this, we estimate how two external shocks that reduce workers' outside options—un...

University as a Melting Pot: Long-term Effects of Internationalization

By Stanislav Avdeev

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

This paper provides the first evidence on the impact of exposure to international students on the long-term outcomes of native students. I combine unique survey and administrative data from the Netherlands covering one million students across three dec...

IT investment and the earnings distribution

[Research Highlight]

February 25, 2026

The geographic dimension of wage polarization.

A short history of Asian immigration

[Research Highlight]

March 10, 2026

Hannah Postel discusses the evolution of Asian immigration to the United States.

Uncertainty and Change: Survey Evidence of Firms’ Subjective Beliefs

By Rüdiger Bachmann, Kai Carstensen, Stefan Lautenbacher, Manuel Menkhoff, and Martin Schneider

American Economic Review

This paper studies how managers plan under uncertainty. In a new panel survey of German manufacturing firms, we observe both forecasts of sales growth and a quantitative measure of subjective uncertainty. We show that subjective uncertainty reflects c...

Mergers, Foreign Competition, and Jobs: Evidence from the U.S. Appliance Industry

By Felix Montag

American Economic Review

Policy choices often create trade-offs between workers and consumers. I examine how foreign competition alters the consumer welfare and domestic employment effects of mergers. I construct a model incorporating consumer demand, endogenous product portfo...

Deadwood Labor? The Effects of Eliminating Employment Protection for Older Workers

By Emmanuel Saez, Benjamin Schoefer, and David Seim

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics

We analyze mandatory retirement in Sweden which eliminates entirely employment protection at age 67. Employment falls by about 10 percent and total average earnings by about 20 percent immediately at age 67. 8 percent of jobs separate immediately due t...