The Returns to Public Library Investment

By Gregory Gilpin, Ezra Karger, and Peter Nencka

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Local governments spend over $12 billion annually funding the operation of 15,427 public libraries in the United States, yet we know little about their effects. We use data describing the near universe of public libraries to show that public library capit...

Do Family Policies Reduce Gender Inequality? Evidence from 60 Years of Policy Experimentation

By Henrik Kleven, Camille Landais, Johanna Posch, Andreas Steinhauer, and Josef Zweimüller

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Do family policies reduce gender inequality in the labor market? We contribute to this debate by investigating the joint impact of parental leave and childcare, using administrative data covering Austrian workers over more than half a century. We start by...

Hospital Queues, Patient Health, and Labor Supply

By Anna Godøy, Venke F. Haaland, Ingrid Huitfeldt, and Mark Votruba

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Long waits for health care raise concerns about the consequences of delayed treatment. We use variation in queue congestion to estimate effects of wait time for orthopedic surgery. We do not find that longer wait times lead to increased health care utiliz...

The Gender Application Gap: Do Men and Women Apply for the Same Jobs?

By Jonas Fluchtmann, Anita M. Glenny, Nikolaj A. Harmon, and Jonas Maibom

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Men and women tend to hold different jobs. Are these differences present already in the types of jobs men and women apply for? Using administrative data on job applications made by the universe of Danish unemployment insurance recipients, we provide evide...

Killing Prescriptions Softly: Low Emission Zones and Child Health from Birth to School

By Hannah Klauber, Felix Holub, Nicolas Koch, Nico Pestel, Nolan Ritter, and Alexander Rohlf

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

We examine the persistence of the impact of early-life exposure to air pollution on children's health from birth to school enrollment using administrative public health insurance records covering one-third of all children in Germany. For identification, w...

Opposing Firm-Level Responses to the China Shock: Output Competition versus Input Supply

By Philippe Aghion, Antonin Bergeaud, Matthieu Lequien, Marc J. Melitz, and Thomas Zuber

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

We decompose the "China shock" into two components that induce different adjustments for firms exposed to Chinese exports: an output shock affecting firms selling goods that compete with similar imported Chinese goods, and an input supply shock affecting ...

Time Aggregation in Health Insurance Deductibles

By Long Hong and Corina Mommaerts

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Health insurance plans increasingly pay for expenses only beyond a large annual deductible. This paper explores the implications of deductibles that reset over shorter timespans. We develop a model of insurance demand between two actuarially equivalent de...

Efficiency and Incidence of Taxation with Free Entry and Love-of-Variety Preferences

By Kory Kroft, Jean-William Laliberté, René Leal-Vizcaíno, and Matthew J. Notowidigdo

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

We develop a theory of commodity taxation featuring imperfect competition along with love-of-variety preferences and endogenous firm entry and exit. We derive new formulas for the efficiency and pass-through of specific and ad valorem taxes. These formula...

Public Pensions and Private Savings

By Esteban García-Miralles and Jonathan M. Leganza

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

How does the provision of public pension benefits impact private savings? We answer this question in the context of a Danish reform that increased social security eligibility ages. Using administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we identi...

Refugee Benefit Cuts

By Christian Dustmann, Rasmus Landersø, and Lars Højsgaard Andersen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

This paper analyzes the effects of Denmark's Start Aid welfare reform that targets refugees. Implemented in 2002, it enables us to study not only the reform's immediate effects but also its longer-term consequences and its repeal a decade later. The refor...

Understanding the Link between Temperature and Crime

By François Cohen and Fidel Gonzalez

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

The correlation between hot weather and crime is well documented but not fully understood. We combine millions of administrative records, victimization surveys on unreported crime, and daily weather information to analyze the effect of temperatures on cri...

The Indirect Fiscal Benefits of Low-Skilled Immigration

By Mark Colas and Dominik Sachs

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Low-skilled immigrants indirectly affect public finances through their effect on resident wages and labor supply. We operationalize this indirect fiscal effect in a model of immigration and the labor market. We derive closed-form expressions for this effe...

Saving Lives with Indexed Disaster Funds: Evidence from Mexico

By Alejandro del Valle

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Developing economies are not disproportionately exposed to natural disasters, but they experience significantly more deaths. Exploiting a discontinuity in the eligibility rules for Mexico's indexed disaster fund (Fonden), I show that the accelerated recon...

Business dynamism and housing markets

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Do house prices impact the share of workers at young firms?

Susan Athey, Distinguished Fellow 2024

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Front Matter

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

Perspectives on the Labor Share

[Symposium: Labor Market and Macroeconomics]

By Loukas Karabarbounis

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

As of 2022, the share of US income accruing to labor is at its lowest level since the Great Depression. Updating previous studies with more recent observations, I document the continuing decline of the labor share for the United States, other countries, a...

Why Labor Supply Matters for Macroeconomics

[Symposium: Labor Market and Macroeconomics]

By Richard Rogerson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

Benchmark models taught in undergraduate macro do not attribute any role for labor supply as an important determinant of macroeconomic outcomes. The first part of this paper documents three facts. First, differences in hours of work across OECD economie...

How Cyclical Is the User Cost of Labor?

[Symposium: Labor Market and Macroeconomics]

By Marianna Kudlyak

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

In employment relationships, a wage is an installment payment on an implicit long-term agreement between a worker and a firm. The price of labor that impacts firm's hiring decisions, instead, reflects the hiring wage as well as the impact of economic cond...

Government Data of the People, by the People, for the People: Navigating Citizen Privacy Concerns

[Symposium: Privacy Protection and Government Data]

By Claire McKay Bowen

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2024

The data privacy community generally agrees that government data should be more widely accessible, especially being of the people (data collected about them), by the people (collected and supported using taxpayer dollars), and for the people (providing pu...