Do Employers Use Unemployment as a Sorting Criterion When Hiring? Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Stefan Eriksson and Dan-Olof Rooth

American Economic Review, March 2014

The stigma associated with long-term unemployment spells could create large inefficiencies in labor markets. While the existing literature points toward large stigma effects, it has proven difficult to estimate causal relationships. Using data from a fiel...

The Growth of Temporary Services Work

By Lewis M. Segal and Daniel G. Sullivan

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1997

Temporary services employment grew rapidly over the past several decades and now accounts for a sizable fraction of aggregate employment. The authors use Current Population Survey data to examine the changing nature of temporary work and discuss explanati...

The Effects of Social Networks on Employment and Inequality

By Antoni Calvó-Armengol and Matthew O. Jackson

American Economic Review, June 2004

We develop a model where agents obtain information about job opportunities through an explicitly modeled network of social contacts. We show that employment is positively correlated across time and agents. Moreover, unemployment exhibits duration dependen...

The Effect of Bottle Laws on Income: New Empirical Results

By Bevin Ashenmiller

American Economic Review, May 2011

Eleven US states have "bottle laws," deposit-refund programs that combine a consumption tax with a recycling rebate. When states set the bottle deposit low enough it becomes a tax on high wage earners, for whom the opportunity cost of their time prevents ...

What Is Middle Class about the Middle Classes around the World?

[Symposium: Development]

By Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2008

We expect a lot from the middle classes. At least three distinct arguments about the special economic role of the middle class are traditionally made. In one, new entrepreneurs armed with a capacity and a tolerance for delayed gratification emerge from th...

Do Labor Market Rigidities Have Microeconomic Effects? Evidence from within the Firm

By Francine Lafontaine and Jagadeesh Sivadasan

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2009

We exploit a unique outlet-level dataset from a multinational chain with over 2,500 outlets in 43 countries to investigate the effects of labor regulations that protect employment. The dataset contains information on output, materials, and labor costs ...

Is American Pet Health Care (Also) Uniquely Inefficient?

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, and Atul Gupta

American Economic Review, May 2017

We document four similarities between American human healthcare and American pet care: (i) rapid growth in spending as a share of GDP over the last two decades; (ii) strong income-spending gradient; (iii) rapid growth in the employment of healthcare provi...

Job Displacement

By Lori G. Kletzer

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 1998

The past decade and a half has seen tremendous research growth in the area of job displacement. This paper discusses the state of knowledge on the issues and questions of job loss. The 1984-96 Displaced Worker Surveys are used to describe how the characte...

Disability Benefit Receipt and Reform: Reconciling Trends in the United Kingdom

[Symposium: Disability Insurance]

By James Banks, Richard Blundell, and Carl Emmerson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 2015

The UK has enacted a number of reforms to the structure of disability benefits that has made it a major case study for other countries thinking of reform. The introduction of Incapacity Benefit in 1995 coincided with a strong decline in disability benefit...

Place Based Policies with Unemployment

By Patrick Kline and Enrico Moretti

American Economic Review, May 2013

We develop a stylized model of frictional local labor markets with the goal of studying the efficiency of unemployment differences across areas. The model adapts the widely used Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides framework to a local labor market setting with a...

The Spike at Benefit Exhaustion: Leaving the Unemployment System or Starting a New Job?

By David Card, Raj Chetty, and Andrea Weber

American Economic Review, May 2007

The Impact of Medicaid on Labor Market Activity and Program Participation: Evidence from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment

By Katherine Baicker, Amy Finkelstein, Jae Song, and Sarah Taubman

American Economic Review, May 2014

In 2008, a group of uninsured low-income adults in Oregon was selected by lottery for the chance to apply for Medicaid. Using this randomized design and 2009 administrative data, we find no significant effect of Medicaid on employment or earnings. Our 95 ...

Comparisons of Weekly Hours over the Past Century and the Importance of Work-Sharing Policies in the 1930s

By Todd C. Neumann, Jason E. Taylor, and Price Fishback

American Economic Review, May 2013

Changes in the work week drove a larger portion of changes in total labor input during the Great Depression of the 1930s than during other decades. Work-sharing policies appear to be responsible. Herbert Hoover created various work-sharing committees--led...

How Much Would US Style Fiscal Integration Buffer European Unemployment and Income Shocks? (A Comparative Empirical Analysis)

By James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote

American Economic Review, May 2013

We examine the degree to which federal fiscal integration smoothes income and unemployment shocks across US States. We find that roughly 25 cents of every dollar of income shock at the state level is offset by federal fiscal policy. This stabilization com...

Unemployment, Vacancies, Wages

By Peter Diamond

American Economic Review, June 2011

Migration, Remittances, and Male and Female Employment Patterns

By Catalina Amuedo-Dorantes and Susan Pozo

American Economic Review, May 2006

The Employment of Low-Skilled Immigrant Men in the United States

By Brian Duncan and Stephen J. Trejo

American Economic Review, May 2012

Using microdata from the 2000 Census, we analyze how the employment rates of foreign-born and US-born men vary with education. After a period of adjustment during the first few years upon arrival, the overall employment rate of immigrant men quickly appro...

Population Size Effects in the Structural Development of England

By Oksana M. Leukhina and Stephen J. Turnovsky

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2016

The English structural transformation from farming to manufacturing was accompanied by rapid technological change, expansion of trade, and massive population growth. While the roles of technology and trade in this process have been investigated, the liter...

Pathways to Adjustment: The Case of Information Technology Workers

By John Bound, Breno Braga, Joseph M. Golden, and Sarah Turner

American Economic Review, May 2013

One long-standing hypothesis about science and engineering labor markets is that the supply of highly skilled workers is likely to be inelastic in the short run. We consider the market for computer scientists and electrical engineers (IT workers) and the ...

Inflation Persistence, the NAIRU, and the Great Recession

By Mark W. Watson

American Economic Review, May 2014

The rate of inflation fell far less over the period 2007-2013 than in the period 1979-1985 despite similar large increases in the unemployment rate. This paper asks why. Possible explanations include a change in the persistence of inflation, changes in NA...