Measuring Labor Market Power Two Ways

By José Azar, Ioana Marinescu, and Marshall Steinbaum

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We compute the "applications elasticity" as a proxy for firm-level labor supply elasticity by regressing the applications to a given job on the posted wage. The average applications elasticity in our data is 0.42. We then relate our elasticity estimates t...

Common Ownership and the Secular Stagnation Hypothesis

By José Azar and Xavier Vives

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

We extend the model in Azar and Vives (2018) to allow for investment and show that higher effective market concentration (augmented by common ownership) leads to lower equilibrium wages, real interest rates, lower output, lower labor share, and lower capi...

Four Years Later: Insurance Coverage and Access to Care Continue to Diverge between ACA Medicaid Expansion and Non-Expansion States

By Sarah Miller and Laura R. Wherry

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper evaluates the impact of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansions four years after implementation using data from the 2010-2017 National Health Interview Survey. We find that low-income adults in states that implemented the Medicaid expansion...

Does Elite Capture Matter? Local Elites and Targeted Welfare Programs in Indonesia

By Vivi Alatas, Abhijit Banerjee, Rema Hanna, Benjamin A. Olken, Ririn Purnamasari, and Matthew Wai-Poi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper investigates how elite capture affects the welfare gains from targeted government transfer programs in Indonesia, using both a high-stakes field experiment that varied the extent of elite influence and nonexperimental data on a variety of exist...

Long-Term Treatment Effects of Job Search Assistance and Training: A Summary of Recent Evidence

By Day Manoli and Ankur Patel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

This paper presents a summary of recent evidence on long-term treatment effects from job search assistance and training services on labor market outcomes. The evidence is based on merging program data from three randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to admi...

A Well-Being Snapshot in a Changing World

By Daniel J. Benjamin, Kristen B. Cooper, Ori Heffetz, and Miles Kimball

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Although technology-driven economic growth generates gains in consumption and employment opportunities, it may also negatively impact other dimensions of well-being, such as emotional well-being or sense of stability. We study 204 aspects of self-reported...

Economic Institutions and Social Progress

By Daniel C. Fehder, Michael E. Porter, and Scott Stern

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Combining data from the social progress index and measures of economic institutions and performance, our analysis focuses on how changes in economic institutions and performance are related to subsequent changes in social progress (noneconomic dimensions ...

The Rise of the Gig Economy: Fact or Fiction?

By Katharine G. Abraham, John Haltiwanger, Kristin Sandusky, and James Spletzer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Gig work mediated through online platforms has received much recent attention. We find only one sector—the transportation services sector—in which there is unambiguous evidence of substantial and rapidly growing gig activity. A challenge for tracking ...

The Evolution of the Online Platform Economy: Evidence from Five Years of Banking Data

By Diana Farrell, Fiona Greig, and Amar Hamoudi

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Measuring the gig economy has been challenging. Drawing on anonymized administrative banking data, we measure supply-side participation in the online platform economy between 2013 and 2018. We find 2.3 million account holders who received payments from 12...

What Do Big Data Tell Us about Why People Take Gig Economy Jobs?

By Dmitri K. Koustas

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The gig economy is widely regarded to be a source of secondary or temporary income, but little is known about economic activity outside of the gig economy. Using data from a large, online personal finance application, I document the evolution of non-gig i...

Older Workers and the Gig Economy

By Cody Cook, Rebecca Diamond, and Paul Oyer

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

As the workforce ages, how will the work lives of older people evolve? One way to ease into retirement is to move to the gig economy where workers choose hours and intensity of work that fit their needs and capabilities. However, older workers are often r...

Who Pays for Rent Control? Heterogeneous Landlord Response to San Francisco's Rent Control Expansion

By Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Using a 1994 law change, we exploit quasi-experimental variation in the assignment of rent control in San Francisco to study which types of landlords bear the burden of decreased rental payments versus substitute away from supplying rent-controlled housin...

Ending Rent Control Reduced Crime in Cambridge

By David H. Autor, Christopher J. Palmer, and Parag A. Pathak

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Using detailed location-specific criminal incident-level data, we find that sudden rent decontrol in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1995 caused overall crime to fall by 16 percent—approximately 1,200 crimes annually. We estimate that this annual direct ben...

The Effects of Second-Generation Rent Control on Land Values

By Andreas Mense, Claus Michelsen, and Konstantin A. Kholodilin

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Second generation rent control seeks to prevent negative quantity effects by exempting newly built units. The artificially lowered rent in the controlled segment makes renting attractive for households that would otherwise not have rented in the market, r...

Spatial Misallocation and Rent Controls

By Guillaume Chapelle, Etienne Wasmer, and Pierre-Henri Bono

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

In many global cities the rental housing market is partially regulated. We document that the Paris housing market is dual: a flexible rent sector coexists with a large controlled rent sector. The two sectors have very different rent gradients towards the ...

Housing Supply Dynamics under Rent Control: What Can Evictions Tell Us?

By Brian J. Asquith

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Measuring how rent-controlled landlords change their housing supply in response to rent increases is difficult, because new construction is automatically exempt. This paper explores evictions as a barometer for landlords' willingness to return their units...

Why the Economics Profession Must Actively Participate in the Privacy Protection Debate

By John M. Abowd, Ian M. Schmutte, William N. Sexton, and Lars Vilhuber

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

When Google or the US Census Bureau publishes detailed statistics on browsing habits or neighborhood characteristics, some privacy is lost for everybody while supplying public information. To date, economists have not focused on the privacy loss inherent ...

Differential Privacy and Census Data: Implications for Social and Economic Research

By Steven Ruggles, Catherine Fitch, Diana Magnuson, and Jonathan Schroeder

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

The Census Bureau has announced new methods for disclosure control in public use data products. The new approach, known as differential privacy, represents a radical departure from current practice. In its pure form, differential privacy techniques may ma...

Reconciling Data Access and Privacy: Building a Sustainable Model for the Future

By Katharine G. Abraham

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

An important factor in the government's ability to collect data from individuals and businesses is the promise that their information will be kept private. Given the explosion of other data increasingly available in electronic form, however, there is a gr...

A Practical Method to Reduce Privacy Loss When Disclosing Statistics Based on Small Samples

By Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2019

Building on insights from the differential privacy literature, we develop a simple noise-infusion method to reduce privacy loss when disclosing statistics such as OLS regression estimates based on small samples. Although our method does not offer a formal...