The Labor Market Returns to Cognitive and Noncognitive Ability: Evidence from the Swedish Enlistment

By Erik Lindqvist and Roine Vestman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2011

We use data from the Swedish military enlistment to assess the importance of cognitive and noncognitive ability for labor market outcomes. The measure of noncognitive ability is based on a personal interview conducted by a psychologist. We find strong evi...

US Manufacturing: Understanding Its Past and Its Potential Future

[Symposium: Manufacturing]

By Martin Neil Baily and Barry P. Bosworth

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2014

The development of the US manufacturing sector over the last half-century displays two striking and somewhat contradictory features: 1) the growth of real output in the US manufacturing sector, measured by real value added, has equaled or exceeded that ...

Trends in Aggregate Concentration in the United States

By Lawrence J. White

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2002

I assemble two rarely used data sets to measure aggregate concentration in the U.S. in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the merger waves of those decades, aggregate concentration declined in the 1980s and the early 1990s, but rose modestly in the late 1990s. ...

Who Suffers during Recessions?

[Symposium: Labor Markets and Unemployment]

By Hilary Hoynes, Douglas L. Miller, and Jessamyn Schaller

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2012

In this paper, we examine how business cycles affect labor market outcomes in the United States. We conduct a detailed analysis of how cycles affect outcomes differentially across persons of differing age, education, race, and gender, and we compare the c...

Institutional Determinants of Labor Reallocation in Transition

[Symposium: Transition Economies]

By Tito Boeri and Katherine Terrell

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2002

The transition process differed in the countries of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) and those of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) in terms of reallocation of labor real wage, employment and output adjustment. We sift through the theoretical and empirical li...

The Effects of Rural Electrification on Employment: New Evidence from South Africa

By Taryn Dinkelman

American Economic Review, December 2011

This paper estimates the impact of electrification on employment growth by analyzing South Africa's mass roll-out of electricity to rural households. Using several new data sources and two different identification strategies (an instrumental variables str...

Does Wage Persistence Matter for Employment Fluctuations? Evidence from Displaced Workers

By Johannes F. Schmieder and Till von Wachter

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2010

Previous literature has found that tight labor market conditions during a job raise wages. Using the Displaced Worker Survey from 1984 to 2006, we show that wage gains associated with good labor market conditions disappear at job loss. We also find that ...

Misclassification Errors and the Underestimation of the US Unemployment Rate

By Shuaizhang Feng and Yingyao Hu

American Economic Review, April 2013

Using recent results in the measurement error literature, we show that the official US unemployment rate substantially underestimates the true level of unemployment, due to misclassification errors in the labor force status in the Current Population Surve...

Theory Ahead of Language in the Economics of Unemployment

[Symposium: The Natural Rate of Unemployment]

By Richard Rogerson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1997

This paper discusses, from the perspective of modern theories of unemployment, several unemployment concepts that have been used over the years. It argues that many of these concepts are of limited value and are dominated by a few simple concepts that are...

Race, Roosevelt, and Wartime Production: Fair Employment in World War II Labor Markets

By William J. Collins

American Economic Review, March 2001

Can a Representative-Agent Model Represent a Heterogeneous-Agent Economy

By Sungbae An, Yongsung Chang, and Sun-Bin Kim

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2009

Accounting for observed fluctuations in aggregate employment, consumption, and real wage using the optimality conditions of a representative household requires preferences that are incompatible with economic priors. In order to reconcile theory with da...

Gender Differences in Pay

[Symposium: Women and the Labor Market]

By Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2000

We consider the gender pay gap in the United States. Both gender-specific factors, including gender differences in qualifications and discrimination, and overall wage structure, the rewards for skills and employment in particular sectors, importantly infl...

Trade Liberalization and Poverty: The Evidence So Far

By L. Alan Winters, Neil McCulloch, and Andrew McKay

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2004

This paper assesses the current state of evidence on the impact of trade policy reform on poverty in developing countries. There is little empirical evidence addressing this question directly, but a lot of related evidence on specific aspects. We summariz...

Trade Adjustment and Human Capital Investments: Evidence from Indian Tariff Reform

By Eric V. Edmonds, Nina Pavcnik, and Petia Topalova

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, October 2010

Does trade policy influence schooling and child labor in low-income countries? We examine this question in the context of India's 1991 tariff reforms. While schooling increased and child labor declined in rural India in the 1990s, these trends are attenua...

Inefficient Hiring in Entry-Level Labor Markets

By Amanda Pallais

American Economic Review, November 2014

Hiring inexperienced workers generates information about their abilities. If this information is public, workers obtain its benefits. If workers cannot compensate firms for hiring them, firms will hire too few inexperienced workers. I determine the effect...

Estimating the Impact of Microcredit on Those Who Take It Up: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Morocco

By Bruno Crépon, Florencia Devoto, Esther Duflo, and William Parienté

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2015

We report results from a randomized evaluation of a microcredit program introduced in rural areas of Morocco in 2006. Thirteen percent of the households in treatment villages took a loan, and none in control villages did. Among households identified as mo...

Mismatch

By Robert Shimer

American Economic Review, September 2007

This paper develops a dynamic model of mismatch. Workers and jobs are randomly allocated to labor markets. Each market clears, but some have excess (unemployed) workers and some have excess (vacant) jobs. As workers and jobs switch markets, unemployed ...

Happiness and the Persistence of Income Shocks

By Christian Bayer and Falko Juessen

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, October 2015

We reassess the empirical effects of income and employment on self-reported well-being. Our analysis makes use of a two-step estimation procedure that allows us to apply instrumental variable regressions with ordinal observable data. As suggested by the ...

Dynamic Inefficiencies in an Employment-Based Health Insurance System: Theory and Evidence

By Hanming Fang and Alessandro Gavazza

American Economic Review, December 2011

We investigate the effects of the institutional settings of the US health care system on individuals' life-cycle medical expenditures. Health is a form of general human capital; labor turnover and labor-market frictions prevent an employer-employee pair ...

Wage Risk and Employment Risk over the Life Cycle

By Hamish Low, Costas Meghir, and Luigi Pistaferri

American Economic Review, September 2010

We specify a life-cycle model of consumption, labor supply and job mobility in an economy with search frictions. We distinguish different sources of risk, including shocks to productivity, job arrival, and job destruction. Allowing for job mobility has a ...