Labor Markets

Fatih Guvenen · Alisdair McKay · Conor Ryan

Guvenen, McKay, and Ryan estimate a stochastic income process for US male workers that simultaneously matches five empirical regularities from Social Security Administration administrative panel data …

Marc K Chan · Cain Polidano · Ha Vu · Roger Wilkins · Andrew Carter · Hang To

Governments across ten-plus countries — including Australia, the United States, Germany, and New Zealand — have introduced matching schemes to encourage low- and middle-income earners to contribute …

Peyman Firouzi Naeim · David W Johnston · Maryam Naghsh-Nejad

This paper examines how workplace environments shape the economic consequences that fall on mothers — but not fathers — when a child is diagnosed with cancer. The motivation is a gap in the …

Axel Gottfries

This paper resolves a long-standing theoretical impasse in labor search models: how to model wage bargaining when workers search on the job (OJS) and the quit rate depends on the wage. Shimer (2006) …

Kjetil Storesletten · Bo Zhao · Fabrizio Zilibotti

This paper asks why the nature of business cycles changes systematically as economies develop and shed their large agricultural sectors. The motivation is both empirical and theoretical.

Saki Bigio · Diego R Känzig · Pablo Sánchez · Conor Walsh

This paper quantifies the sources and distributional consequences of unexpected carbon price changes for European households using a money-metric welfare framework. The motivation is stark: while …

Patrick J. Kennedy · Christine L. Dobridge · Paul Landefeld · Jacob Mortenson

This paper estimates the firm- and worker-level effects of the corporate income tax cuts in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) — the largest corporate tax cut in U.S. history — to inform the …

Antoine Bertheau · Rune Vejlin

Research question and motivation. On-the-job search models typically organize firms along a "job ladder" — a common ranking by workers of available jobs — but they disagree on whether the rung is best …

Ia Vardishvili

US cohorts of establishments born in recessions persistently employ fewer workers at entry and over their life cycle, yet are on average more productive than expansionary cohorts; the number of …

Ruixue Jia · Xiao Ma · Victoria Wenxin Xie

This paper studies how the expectation of rising flood risk — distinct from realized flood events — reshapes where firms locate, where workers live and how much they work, and what this implies for …

Tristany Armangué-Jubert · Tancredi Rapone · Alessandro Ruggieri

Firms are larger and grow faster over the life cycle in high-income countries, while labor markets in poorer countries are less competitive (employers hold more wage-setting power). The paper asks how …

Hiroshi Inokuma · Juan M. Sánchez

This paper asks how the well-documented slowdown in labor-force growth affects aggregate total factor productivity (TFP) growth, a question that prior work on business dynamism had left unanswered. …

Rodrigo Adão · Costas Arkolakis · Federico Esposito

How do international trade shocks propagate through spatially connected regional labor markets, and how large are the general equilibrium effects that standard shift-share specifications miss? Adão, …

Hyejoon Im · John McLaren

Im and McLaren (2025) ask whether globalization induces governments to weaken labor standards for workers — the so-called "race to the bottom" (RTB) hypothesis. The question has high stakes: advocates …

Nick Pretnar · Maria Feldman

The paper investigates why the U.S. health-services sector has simultaneously experienced a tripling of relative prices since 1948 and a rise in the personal consumption expenditure (PCE) share from …

Isabel Cairó · Avi Lipton

This paper addresses two connected questions: why do Black workers face persistently higher and more volatile unemployment than white workers, and can the Federal Reserve's August 2020 shift from a …

Benjamin Bridgman · Berthold Herrendorf

The paper asks why the U.S. labor share has declined over the postwar period, and whether rising markups or capital deepening (automation, falling capital prices) is the primary driver. The authors …

Christian Bredemeier · Babette Jansen · Roland Winkler

This paper proposes a novel fiscal transmission channel through which government spending expansions reduce employer monopsony power in the labor market, generating larger fiscal multipliers and …

Junichi Fujimoto · David Lagakos · Mitchell VanVuren

This paper asks whether publicly funded ("free") secondary schooling in developing countries raises GDP per capita. The question is policy-relevant because many low-income countries — including Ghana, …

Nezih Guner · Christopher Rauh · Gustavo Ventura

Guner, Rauh, and Ventura document the scope, generosity, distributional impact, and time evolution of means-tested transfers to working-age US households, and provide parametric estimates of transfer …

Barton H. Hamilton · Andrés Hincapié · Emma C. Kalish · Nicholas W. Papageorge

This paper asks why medical innovation can widen health disparities even when it unambiguously improves health for everyone who takes it. The authors argue that the standard access-versus-preferences …

Vahagn Jerbashian

This paper estimates the elasticities of substitution between labor, information and communication technology (ICT) and intellectual property (IP) capital, and traditional capital using a nested …

Frédéric Docquier · Stefano Iandolo · Hillel Rapoport · Riccardo Turati · Gonzague Vannoorenberghe

This paper investigates how the skill structure of globalization shocks — rather than globalization per se — drives the long-run evolution of populism across countries, making a unified empirical case …

Ferdinando Monte · Charly Porcher · Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

Monte, Porcher, and Rossi-Hansberg ask why remote work surged abruptly and permanently after COVID-19 despite information-technology advances raising it only marginally between 1980 and 2019, why the …

Scott French · Tess M. Stafford

A large empirical literature uses micro data to estimate the intertemporal elasticity of substitution (IES) of labor supply, a parameter crucial for understanding business-cycle fluctuations in hours …

Martin Shu

This paper asks whether worker self-selection, rather than slow technological progress, can explain the low measured labor productivity growth in the U.S. service sector — a phenomenon known as …

Loren Brandt · Ruochen Dai · Gueorgui Kambourov · Kjetil Storesletten · Xiaobo Zhang

This paper studies entrepreneurship and new firm creation in China through the lens of serial entrepreneurs (SEs) — individuals who establish more than one firm — contrasting them with non-serial …

Heejeong Kim · Jung Hwan Kim

U.S. outstanding student debt rose roughly 20-fold, from about $50 billion in 1985 to nearly $1 trillion in 2014 (about 7% of GDP), making it the second-largest form of household debt after mortgages.

Hans A. Holter · Serhiy Stepanchuk · Yicheng Wang

This paper investigates how the level and progressivity of personal income taxes shape entrepreneurial activity in the United States, contributing empirical evidence, theoretical intuition, and a …

Katrine Jakobsen · Henrik Kleven · Jonas Kolsrud · Camille Landais · Mathilde Muñoz

Proposals to tax top wealth (e.g., Saez and Zucman, 2019) face a recurring objection in public debate: that the wealthy will emigrate en masse and, because many are entrepreneurs, their departure will …

Alessandra Fenizia · Nicholas Li · Luca Citino

This paper studies the cost-effectiveness of targeted payroll tax reductions as a tool for stimulating labor demand among marginalized workers, using a natural experiment from Italy. The motivation is …

Rosemary Kaiser

Many countries, primarily in Europe, apply dismissal protections to permanent employment contracts but not to temporary ones, creating a two-tiered labor market in which younger and less educated …

Jean-Félix Brouillette

Women accounted for only 3% of U.S. inventors in 1976 and still just 14% in 2023, a pace of convergence far slower than in law (3% to 49%) or medicine (6% to 46%) over the same period. Under the …

Hideki Nakamura · Masakatsu Nakamura · Shota Moriwaki

This paper asks a foundational question: can the economy-wide degree of automation be measured coherently from standard macroeconomic data, without relying on technology-specific proxies such as robot …

Julián Costas-Fernández · José-Alberto Guerra · Myra Mohnen

This paper asks whether proximity to transport infrastructure can sever the occupational tie between parents and children — a question with direct bearing on the debate over place-based versus …

Rüdiger Bachmann · Kai Carstensen · Stefan Lautenbacher · Manuel Menkhoff · Martin Schneider

A large literature shows that firms perceiving more uncertainty make more cautious intertemporal decisions (investment, hiring, price setting), but it is far less clear what makes firms uncertain in …

Horng Chern Wong

Why do some firms pay persistently higher wages for observably similar workers, and what role do firms' product-market power (monopoly/markups), labor-market power (monopsony/markdowns), and workers' …

Sarah Sander

This paper estimates the causal effects of universal daycare access on mothers' labor force participation, full-time employment, hours worked, and earnings across 34 years after the birth of their …

Titan Alon · Damien Capelle · Kazushige Matsuda

This paper proposes that university R&D is determined endogenously by competition for tuition and talented students in the market for higher education, and asks why universities fund research …

Michael W. L. Elsby · Axel Gottfries · Pawel Krolikowski · Gary Solon

This paper develops a tractable theoretical model of wage dynamics in long-term employment relationships, situated between two polar extremes in the existing literature: continual Nash renegotiation …

Melanie Wallskog · Nicholas Bloom · Scott Ohlmacher · Cristina Tello-Trillo

This paper investigates how within-firm pay inequality relates to firm-level labor productivity, using a novel linkage of three confidential U.S. Census Bureau datasets covering millions of workers at …

Juan J Dolado · Etienne Lalé · Hélène Turon

Dolado, Lalé, and Turon build a structural equilibrium model of the U.K. low-wage labour market to evaluate zero-hours contracts (ZHCs), employment agreements under which firms are not required to …

Marc Folch · Luca Mazzone

Folch and Mazzone ask how undergraduate student debt shapes three intertwined post-college decisions — whether to pursue a post-bachelor (graduate) degree, the trajectory of earnings, and whether/when …

Can Xu · Andreas Steiner

Research question and motivation: The paper asks whether and why the type of employment — specifically public-sector employment — affects household saving rates in China. This matters because Chinese …

David Berger · Thomas Hasenzagl · Kyle Herkenhoff · Simon Mongey · Eric A. Posner

Antitrust review of mergers has historically focused almost entirely on harm to consumers (product-market monopoly), ignoring harm to workers (labor-market monopsony). Following the July 2021 White …

Jay Hyun · Ziho Park · Vladimir Smirnyagin

This paper documents a novel channel through which trade shocks propagate across industries: the internal networks of U.S. multisector firms (the working paper circulated as "Import Competition and …

Sebastian Graves · Victoria Gregory · Lars Ljungqvist · Thomas J. Sargent

How does endogenizing retirement (career-length) choice change the labor-supply and human-capital implications of the canonical Heckman, Lochner, and Taber (1998a, HLT) life-cycle general-equilibrium …

Justine Guillochon

Research question and motivation: The paper asks whether and which television news topics shape French households' one-year-ahead macroeconomic expectations (inflation, unemployment, economic …

Ilyana Kuziemko · Nicolas Longuet-Marx · Suresh Naidu

Why have less-educated voters in the United States abandoned the Democratic Party over recent decades? The paper argues that the Democratic Party's evolution on economic policy — specifically its …

Ana Costa-Ramón · Michaela Slotwinski · Ursina Schaede · Anne Ardila Brenøe

This paper investigates whether information constraints — rather than fully forward-looking choices — contribute to mothers' reduced labor supply after childbirth, a key driver of gender inequality. …

Gaurav Khanna · Emir Murathanoglu · Caroline Theoharides · Dean Yang

This paper asks how persistent increases in international migrant income prospects affect long-run economic development in migrant-origin areas. The central question is whether Philippine provinces …

Jonas Hjort · Xuan Li · Heather Sarsons

Many multinationals do not fully adjust wages to the local context of their foreign establishments; instead, they partially link the wages of foreign workers in a given position to the wages paid in …

Andrea Matranga · Timur Natkhov

This paper investigates the origins of serfdom in early modern Russia, arguing that the institution consolidated primarily through political economy dynamics between the crown and a landholding …

Eric Chyn · Diego Daruich

How should governments design neighborhood-based policies to improve long-run outcomes for children, once one accounts for general equilibrium (GE) forces—endogenous rents, neighborhood quality, …

Ping Wang · Tsz-Nga Wong

Wang and Wong develop a continuous-time labor-search model to assess the dynamic effects of generative AI (GenAI) on labor productivity and unemployment. The paper is motivated by conflicting …

Daron Acemoglu · Pascual Restrepo

Acemoglu and Restrepo examine the effects of automation in economies where labor market distortions cause some workers to earn rents—wages above their opportunity cost or outside option. The central …

Sydnee Caldwell · Ingrid Haegele · Jörg Heining

How prevalent is individual wage bargaining in the labor market, what determines firms' bargaining strategies, how do bargaining encounters unfold for workers, and does heterogeneity in bargaining …

Almut Balleer · Georg Duernecker · Susanne Forstner · Johannes Goensch

The paper asks two questions: (1) How do workers' biased expectations about job finding and job separation shape the labor market equilibrium and wages? (2) Are differences in expectation biases …

Raj Chetty · Will Dobbie · Benjamin Goldman · Sonya R Porter · Crystal S Yang

This paper documents sharp divergent trends in intergenerational economic mobility by race and class in the United States across the 1978 to 1992 birth cohorts, and investigates the causal mechanisms …

Giorgio Chiovelli · Stelios Michalopoulos · Elias Papaioannou · Sandra Sequeira

This paper examines the impact of conflict-driven forced displacement on human capital accumulation using the Mozambican civil war (1977–1992) as the empirical setting. During this war, over four …

Abhay Aneja · Silvia Farina · Guo Xu

This paper asks whether exposure to greater female representation in the workplace can persistently reduce intergenerational gender gaps in labor market outcomes. The authors exploit the sudden, …

J. Carter Braxton

This comment, written by J. Carter Braxton (University of Wisconsin), discusses the paper "Artificial Intelligence and Technological Unemployment" by Wang and Wong (2025), which develops and …

Felipe Gonçalves · Elisa Jácome · Emily Weisburst

This paper studies how immigration enforcement affects public safety, asking two questions: (1) what is the effect of increased enforcement on criminal victimization, and (2) how does increased …

Sara G Castellanos · Diego Jiménez-Hernández · Aprajit Mahajan · Eduardo Alcaraz Prous · Enrique Seira

This paper asks two related questions bearing on financial inclusion policy in developing countries: (1) How effective are credit card contract term changes — specifically interest rate reductions and …

Frank Yang

This paper studies when a principal can improve upon simple one-dimensional mechanisms by also deploying costly nonprice screening instruments — actions that are socially wasteful yet potentially …

Pol Campos-Mercade · Lorenz Goette · Thomas Graeber · Alexandre Kellogg · Charles Sprenger

This paper examines whether heterogeneity in individual gain-loss attitudes — the degree to which people weigh losses more or less severely than equivalent gains — contaminates prior tests of …

Taha Choukhmane

Does automatic enrollment (auto-enrollment) in retirement savings plans increase lifetime wealth accumulation and welfare? The prior literature established large short-run participation effects but …

Amanda Dahlstrand

This paper asks whether digital platforms can improve healthcare outcomes by enabling needs-based matching between patients and physicians unconstrained by geography. Amanda Dahlstrand studies digital …

Nikhil Agarwal · Paulo Somaini

Agarwal and Somaini study demand estimation in markets where consumers face latent choice constraints — situations where a consumer's effective choice set is determined not only by her preferences but …

Alan J Auerbach · Yuriy Gorodnichenko · Daniel Murphy

This paper estimates the distributional and social consequences of Department of Defense (DOD) contract spending using a city-level (CBSA) panel dataset spanning 2005–2016. The research question is …

Ingrid Huitfeldt · Victoria Marone · Daniel Waldinger

This paper studies the design of dynamic reassignment mechanisms—centralized systems that must not only provide good initial matches but also accommodate changes in agents' preferences over time. The …

Panle Jia Barwick · Siyu Chen · Chao Fu · Teng Li

This paper estimates the causal effects of mobile app usage on college students' academic performance, physical health, and labor market outcomes, while separately identifying behavioral (endogenous) …

Andreas Hornstein · Marios Karabarbounis · André Kurmann · Etienne Lalé · Lien Ta

This paper isolates the disincentive effects of pandemic unemployment insurance (UI) benefits on employment recovery, separating them from the simultaneously operating stimulative (demand) effects …

Raj Chetty · David J Deming · John N Friedman

This paper studies why children from high-income families are more likely to attend Ivy-Plus colleges (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, Duke, Chicago — 12 colleges total) and whether attending these …

Supreet Kaur · Sendhil Mullainathan · Suanna Oh · Frank Schilbach

The paper tests whether financial concerns distract workers sufficiently to meaningfully reduce their productivity, and whether receiving cash — by alleviating those concerns — can raise output even …

Jonathon Hazell · Bledi Taska

Hazell and Taska use wages posted on online job vacancies — matched to job titles and establishment identifiers from Burning Glass Technologies — to measure the wage for new hires at the job level …

Cynthia L Doniger

This paper asks how the cyclical sensitivity of wages varies with workers' educational attainment, what mechanisms drive the differences, and what the welfare consequences are of ignoring this …

Diego Gentile Passaro · Fuhito Kojima · Bobak Pakzad-Hurson

This paper studies the labor market effects of "Equal Pay for Similar Work" (EPSW) policies — laws that require firms to pay equal wages to workers of different protected-class identities (e.g., …

Brent Bundick · Isabel Cairó · Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau

This paper investigates whether and how assumptions about household and firm expectations alter the macroeconomic implications of asymmetries commonly embedded in macroeconomic models. Specifically, …

Naoki Aizawa · Corina Mommaerts · Stephanie Rennane

This paper studies (1) how firm accommodation decisions respond to financial incentives in the context of workplace disability under workers' compensation, (2) what the causal effect of accommodation …

Richard Audoly

How do aggregate economic fluctuations reallocate workers across the firm productivity distribution over the business cycle? In particular, to what extent do recessions impede workers' movement up the …

Emmanuel Dhyne · Ayumu Ken Kikkawa · Toshiaki Komatsu · Magne Mogstad · Felix Tintelnot

The paper asks three related questions in the context of Belgium, a small open economy: (1) What do firms' responses to demand shocks reveal about their cost structures? (2) What are the worker and …

Nava Ashraf · Maxim Bakhtin · Erica Field · Alessandra Voena · Roberta Ziparo

This paper investigates whether information asymmetries within households about maternal health risk can explain persistent spousal disagreement over fertility in a high-fertility, …

N. Meltem Daysal · Hui Ding · Maya Rossin-Slater · Hannes Schwandt

This paper studies the short- and long-term consequences of intra-household respiratory disease transmission from older to younger siblings in Danish families. The central research questions are: (1) …

Steven J. Davis · John Haltiwanger

Davis and Haltiwanger use a longitudinal establishment-level data set covering roughly 160,000 U.S. manufacturing establishments from 1972 to 1986 to document that gross job creation and destruction …

Elena Capatina · Michael Keane

Capatina and Keane build and calibrate a life-cycle model of labor supply and savings for U.S. men that incorporates health shocks, endogenous human capital accumulation via learning-by-doing, …

Andrii Parkhomenko

This paper asks why job polarization and income inequality are higher in large U.S. cities, and proposes a novel housing-market mechanism that operates independently of — but interacts with — the …

Ben Weidmann · Joseph Vecci · Farah Said · Sonia Bhalotra · Achyuta Adhvaryu · Anant Nyshadham · Jorge Tamayo · David Deming

This paper develops a novel experimental method to identify the causal contribution of managers to team performance, and uses it to evaluate which characteristics predict managerial effectiveness and …

Elliott Ash · Daniel L Chen · Suresh Naidu

This paper quantifies the effect of the Manne Economics Institute for Federal Judges — an intensive two-week economics training program run by the Law and Economics Center from 1976 to 1998 — on the …

Wooyong Lee

This paper studies linear panel data models where regression coefficients are individual-specific (random coefficients) and regressors may be predetermined — that is, sequentially exogenous rather …

Esther Duflo · Pascaline Dupas · Elizabeth Spelke · Mark Walsh

This paper provides experimental evidence on the intergenerational impacts of secondary education subsidies in a low-income context, leveraging a randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in rural …

Mathilde Muñoz

This paper asks whether differences in labor market regulations — specifically payroll taxes and minimum wages — shape countries' comparative advantage in the cross-border provision of labor-intensive …

Christoph Albert · Albrecht Glitz · Joan Llull

Why have immigrant-native wage gaps widened substantially across arrival cohorts in the United States since the 1960s, and why has the speed of wage convergence slowed? The paper argues that the …

Serdar Birinci · Fatih Karahan · Yusuf Mercan · Kurt See

The paper asks two related questions: (1) How much, and through which channels, do employer-to-employer (EE) worker transitions affect macroeconomic outcomes — particularly inflation? (2) What is the …

Olivier Blanchard · Jordi Galí

A New Keynesian model is extended with hiring costs that rise in labour market tightness and with real wage rigidity, so that unemployment exists and moves. Under the paper's utility specification the …

Abu Siddique · Michael Vlassopoulos · Yves Zenou

This paper investigates whether virtual contact — exposure to an outgroup through a documentary film — can promote interethnic harmony, and whether targeting network-central individuals amplifies …

Laurent Gobillon · Thierry Magnac · Sébastien Roux

This paper asks how wage inequalities build up over the life cycle when individual wage trajectories are plagued by interruptions in private-sector participation, and when the standard Missing At …

Jonathan Créchet · Etienne Lalé · Linas Tarasonis

The paper asks: what are the sources of cross-country differences in aggregate employment across European economies, and which types of worker flows — between employment (E), unemployment (U), and …

Amy Finkelstein · Matthew J Notowidigdo · Frank Schilbach · Jonathan Zhang

Does the Great Recession reduce or increase mortality, and what are the welfare implications of incorporating recession-induced mortality changes into standard macroeconomic welfare frameworks?

Morten O. Ravn · Vincent Sterk

A HANK model that is tractable enough to solve on paper, built by grafting Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides search frictions onto a New Keynesian economy and then imposing assumptions that make the wealth …

Virginia Minni

This paper asks why managers matter for firm performance, and specifically whether managers improve productivity by matching workers to better-suited jobs inside firms rather than through supervision, …

Renjie Bao · Jan De Loecker · Jan Eeckhout

This paper asks whether managers are paid for market power. Bao, De Loecker, and Eeckhout build a general equilibrium model in which firms compete oligopolistically in goods markets (following Atkeson …

Jack Mountjoy

This paper asks whether enrolling in an American public university generates positive net returns for marginal students — those who barely qualify for admission — and whether those returns justify …

Alberto Bisin · Giulia Tura

Bisin and Tura study the cultural integration of immigrants in Italy by estimating a structural model of marital matching embedded with intra-household decisions — fertility, socialization of …

David Berger · Kyle Herkenhoff · Simon Mongey

Can minimum wages improve welfare through efficiency — by correcting monopsony-driven under-employment — and, if so, by how much? What is the optimal minimum wage, and how much of the welfare gain …

Kelli Marquardt

This paper develops and estimates a structural model of ADHD diagnosis to decompose the mechanisms driving the observed 2.3:1 male-to-female diagnostic difference in the United States. The research …

Rüdiger Bachmann · Christian Bayer · Heiko Stüber · Felix Wellschmied

When employers face a trade-off between growing large and paying low wages — that is, when they have monopsony power — some productive employers will decide to acquire fewer customers, forgo sales, …

Michael P Leung · Hyungsik Roger Moon

This paper proves a central limit theorem (CLT) for network formation models with strategic interactions and homophilous agents, addressing a foundational inferential gap in the econometrics of large …

Anmol Bhandari · Tobey Kass · Thomas J. May · Ellen R. McGrattan · Evan Schulz

This paper uses a novel longitudinal administrative dataset drawn from U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Social Security Administration (SSA) records to characterize income dynamics and the …

Timothy Christensen · Hyungsik Roger Moon · Frank Schorfheide

This paper derives asymptotically optimal statistical decision rules for discrete choice problems when the payoffs associated with some choices are only partially identified. The research question is: …

Klaus M Schmidt · Jonas von Wangenheim

Schmidt and von Wangenheim develop a dynamic model of organizational change in which workers have reference-dependent preferences — specifically loss aversion and social comparisons — to explain …

Michela Maria Tincani

This paper investigates the mechanisms behind peer effects in the classroom using exogenous variation in study disruptions generated by the 2010 Maule mega-earthquake in Chile (magnitude 8.8, the …

Menaka Hampole · Francesca Truffa · Ashley Wong

This paper investigates whether exposure to a larger share of female peers during an MBA program causally affects the gender gap in senior corporate leadership positions. The research question is …

Cecile Gaubert · Patrick Kline · Damian Vergara · Danny Yagan

Should national governments redistribute income to residents of poor areas through place-based transfers, or should redistribution rely solely on place-blind (income-only) taxes? The longstanding view …

Richard Dennis · Tatiana Kirsanova

Dennis and Kirsanova ask whether shocks to labor-market matching efficiency and worker bargaining power pose a significant problem for monetary policy, and whether the inability to commit (discretion …

Emanuele Colonnelli · Valdemar Pinho Neto · Edoardo Teso

Do individual political views shape firm behavior and labor market outcomes in the private sector? Specifically, do business owners sort copartisan workers into their firms, and does employers' …

Aaron Chalfin · Felipe Gonçalves

This paper studies how public sector workers balance professional motivations against private economic concerns, using arrest decisions by Dallas Police Department (DPD) officers as the empirical …

Ayşe İmrohoroğlu · Çağrı S. Kumru · Jiu Lian

This paper asks whether racial differences in labor income can simultaneously explain both the crime gap and the wealth gap between Black and White individuals in the United States. The authors build …

Cody Tuttle

This paper studies racial disparities in federal criminal sentencing by analyzing abnormal bunching in the distribution of crack-cocaine amounts recorded at sentencing. The identifying variation comes …

Manasvini Singh · Atheendar Venkataramani

Singh and Venkataramani ask whether resource scarcity causes discriminatory rationing of health care by patient race, with patient death as the starkest possible outcome of biased allocation …

Carolina Arteaga · Victoria Barone

This paper establishes a causal connection between the opioid epidemic and the political realignment toward the Republican Party in the United States from the mid-2000s through 2022. The …

Edward C. Prescott

This 1986 Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review piece is Edward Prescott's direct reply, in the same issue, to Lawrence Summers's "Some Skeptical Observations on Real Business Cycle …

Victor Gay · Paula E. Gobbi · Marc Goñi

Gay, Gobbi, and Goñi test Le Play's (1875) hypothesis that the French Revolution contributed to France's early fertility decline by abolishing impartible inheritance. In 1793, a series of decrees …

Ethan Ligon

This paper identifies and corrects a fundamental flaw in the standard methodology for testing efficient risk-sharing when shocks are covariate (affecting common prices rather than only individual …

Henrique S. Basso · Omar Rachedi

Basso and Rachedi investigate how robot adoption influences inflation dynamics — specifically, whether the surge in automation during the 2000s and 2010s can explain the muted sensitivity of inflation …

Clement Imbert · Gabriel Ulyssea

Does rural-urban migration increase or decrease urban informality, and through what mechanisms — and does the answer depend on the time horizon?

Qingen Gai · Naijia Guo · Bingjing Li · Qinghua Shi · Xiaodong Zhu

This paper asks why so much labor stays in low-productivity agriculture in developing countries, and treats the county-by-county rollout of China's New Rural Pension Scheme (NRPS) between 2009 and …

Deniz Dutz · Ingrid Huitfeldt · Santiago Lacouture · Magne Mogstad · Alexander Torgovitsky · Winnie van Dijk

This paper addresses nonresponse bias in surveys — the distortion that arises when survey participants differ systematically from nonparticipants in ways that correlate with the survey's outcomes of …

Duncan Webb

This paper examines how two types of communication about a minority group affect discriminatory behavior: (i) horizontal communication between majority-group members, and (ii) top-down communication …

Oren Danieli

This paper proposes a model of skill-replacing routine-biased technological change (SR-RBTC) to explain patterns in U.S. bottom-half wage inequality that standard RBTC models cannot account for.

Lawrence H. Summers

This 1986 Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review piece, responding directly to Edward Prescott's companion article "Theory Ahead of Business Cycle Measurement" in the same issue, argues …

Matthew J Delventhal · Andrii Parkhomenko

Delventhal and Parkhomenko build a quantitative spatial model of the United States to study how the rise of telecommuting reshapes the distribution of residents, jobs, and housing costs across and …

Agneta Berge · Ann-Sofie Kolm · Per Krusell

This paper asks whether a labor market with search-and-matching frictions and firms producing under decreasing returns to labor is better characterized by in-house hiring with intra-firm wage …

Daniel Haanwinckel

How do workforce composition (labor supply), labor demand, and minimum wage policy jointly determine the wage distribution in imperfectly competitive labor markets, and what were the quantitative …

Ingrid Haegele

This paper provides the first empirical evidence of talent hoarding in organizations — the practice whereby managers deliberately suppress workers' internal mobility to retain productive team members, …

Mark Gertler · Christopher Huckfeldt · Antonella Trigari

This paper measures and models the role of temporary layoffs (TL) in cyclical unemployment dynamics, motivating the analysis by the extraordinary surge in temporary layoffs at the onset of the …

Soonwoo Kwon · Jonathan Roth

Kwon and Roth develop econometric tests for the "sharp null of full mediation": the hypothesis that a treatment D affects an outcome Y only through a specified mechanism (or set of mechanisms) M, with …

Samuel Bazzi · Andreas Ferrara · Martin Fiszbein · Thomas Pearson · Patrick A Testa

This paper investigates how white migration out of the postbellum South diffused Confederate culture and entrenched racial norms across the United States during a critical juncture of westward …

Greg Howard · Hansen Shao

Howard and Shao document a new empirical regularity in U.S. internal migration: the t-year interstate migration rate — defined as the share of people living in a different state than they did t years …

Joshua D Gottlieb · Maria Polyakova · Kevin Rinz · Hugh Shiplett · Victoria Udalova

What do U.S. physicians earn, how is that earnings variation structured across geography and specialty, and how much does government healthcare payment policy shape those earnings and — through them — …

Ulrika Ahrsjö · Costas Meghir · Mårten Palme · Marieke Schnabel

This paper studies the intergenerational effects of education policy on crime, asking whether a compulsory schooling reform that reduced crime among those directly exposed also reduced crime among …

Michael Wiebe

This paper is a comment on Moretti (2021b), which studied agglomeration effects for innovation by testing whether the size of technology clusters causes patenting. The original paper (M21) used US …

Michael Frakes · Jonathan Gruber

This paper asks whether racial concordance between patients and medical providers — specifically, whether Black patients are treated by Black physicians — improves use of preventive care and reduces …

Kyle Greenberg · Melanie Wasserman · E Anna Weber

Greenberg, Wasserman, and Weber (2024/2026) ask whether men negatively respond—in terms of job performance, behavior, and workplace perceptions—when women first enter an exclusively male occupation. …

Elio Nimier-David · David Sraer · David Thesmar

This paper studies the causal effects of mandatory profit-sharing on workers and firms using a quasi-experimental design arising from a 1990 French reform that lowered the eligibility threshold for …

Lars Ljungqvist · Thomas J. Sargent

This 1998 Journal of Political Economy paper by Lars Ljungqvist and Thomas Sargent argues that the persistently high unemployment that struck European welfare states from the 1980s onward reflects not …

Tanguy Bernard · Stefan Dercon · Kate Orkin · Giulio Schinaia · Alemayehu Seyoum Taffesse

This paper tests whether a light-touch behavioral intervention targeting aspirations can produce persistent economic effects on a poor rural population. The research question is whether changing how …

Iacopo Morchio · Christian Moser

This paper uses linked employer-employee data from Brazil (RAIS, 2007–2014, covering 267 million worker-years, 56 million unique workers, and 607,000 employers) to document that the gender pay gap of …

Moritz Kuhn · Iourii Manovskii · Xincheng Qiu

This paper asks why unemployment rates differ so persistently across local labor markets, and what role job creation and job destruction play in generating those differences. The authors document a …

Julien Albertini · Arthur Poirier · Anthony Terriau

This paper studies the effect of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) on educational attainment and labor market trajectories through two complementary approaches. Using policy discontinuities at U.S.

Andrew Garin · Dmitri Koustas · Carl McPherson · Samuel Norris · Matthew Pecenco · Evan K. Rose · Yotam Shem-Tov · Jeffrey Weaver

This paper estimates the causal effect of incarceration on employment, wage earnings, self-employment, and tax filing behavior using administrative criminal justice data linked to Internal Revenue …

David A. Green · Ben M. Sand · Iain G. Snoddy · Jeanne Tschopp

This paper estimates the impact of unions on nonunion wage setting in the United States over the period 1980–2010, distinguishing two channels through which unions affect nonunion wages: (1) a …

Thomas F. Cooley · Gary D. Hansen

Cooley and Hansen introduce money into a real-business-cycle model -- Hansen's (1985) indivisible-labor economy with employment lotteries -- via a cash-in-advance constraint that applies only to …

Andrew Garin · Jonathan Rothbaum

Does government-led construction of large manufacturing plants in previously under-industrialized regions generate long-run improvements in regional economic development and in the lifetime earnings …

Erik G. Hurst · Patrick Kehoe · Elena Pastorino · Thomas Winberry

This paper builds a dynamic macroeconomic model with rich worker heterogeneity, firm monopsony power and putty-clay adjustment frictions in order to trace the time path of the effects of the federal …

Fatih Guvenen · Serdar Ozkan · Jae Song

This 2014 *Journal of Political Economy* paper (circulated as Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Staff Report 476, December 2012; the Minneapolis Fed's own hosting of this PDF is currently …

Mikhail Golosov · Ilia Krasikov

What is the optimal joint nonlinear earnings tax schedule for married couples? How should one spouse's marginal tax rate depend on the other's earnings? When is individual earnings-based (separable) …

Natalia Emanuel · Emma Harrington · Amanda Pallais

This paper studies how physical proximity to coworkers affects on-the-job training and productivity, using software engineers at a Fortune 500 online retailer observed from 2019 to 2024. The authors …

David Chan · Yiqun Chen

This paper studies the productivity of nurse practitioners (NPs) versus physicians performing overlapping tasks in Veterans Health Administration (VHA) emergency departments (EDs), exploiting a …

Olivier Blanchard · Justin Wolfers

Blanchard and Wolfers argue that neither adverse macroeconomic shocks alone nor adverse labor market institutions alone can account for the two central facts about European unemployment: its rise from …

Gary D. Hansen · Ayşe İmrohoroğlu

Hansen and Imrohoroglu build a dynamic general-equilibrium economy -- deliberately designed to give unemployment insurance (UI) the most favorable possible conditions -- to compute the potential …

Marta García-Rodríguez

This paper develops a Mortensen-Pissarides (DMP) search and matching model with internally rational (IR) agents who hold subjective beliefs about wages rather than perfect knowledge of the Nash …

Eliana Carranza · Aletheia Donald · Florian Grosset-Touba · Supreet Kaur

This paper asks whether informal redistributive pressure — the social obligation to share earned income with kin and social networks — distorts labor supply in low-income communities. The authors …

Susan Athey · Raj Chetty · Guido W Imbens · Hyunseung Kang

This paper addresses a fundamental challenge in program evaluation: primary outcomes of interest — such as lifetime earnings or long-term employment — are often observed only with lengthy delays, …

Natalie Bau · Gaurav Khanna · Corinne Low · Alessandra Voena

This paper asks whether dowry — a transfer from the bride's family to the groom's household upon marriage, prevalent throughout India — enables male migration by providing liquidity that compensates …

Kieu-Trang Nguyen

This paper investigates whether and how a CEO's inherited generalized trust enhances innovation within firms, offering a micro-foundation for the well-documented macro-level relationship between …

Gordon B. Dahl · Matthew M. Knepper

Seven U.S. states permanently cut unemployment insurance (UI) benefits by 30–64 percent between 2011 and 2014, providing the study's quasi-experimental variation.

Desmond Ang · Sahil Chinoy

This paper provides the first causal evidence on how military service shaped Black civil rights activism in the aftermath of World War I. The research question is whether random induction into the …

Ellora Derenoncourt · David Weil

This paper studies the labor market effects of voluntary minimum wages (VMWs) — company-wide, publicly announced wage floors set by large private employers — in the U.S. low-wage retail and service …

Sebastian Heise · Jeremy Pearce · Jacob P. Weber

Which measures of labor market tightness best predict nominal wage inflation, and do standard measures such as the unemployment rate and the vacancy-to-unemployment ratio capture the relevant slack? …

John J Conlon · Dev Patel

Conlon and Patel test whether students stereotype the link between college majors and occupations — that is, whether they exaggerate the likelihood that majors lead to their "representative" careers …

Olivier Blanchard · Lawrence F. Katz

Blanchard and Katz assess three decades of research on the determinants of the natural rate of unemployment and reach two main conclusions: that there has been considerable theoretical progress, …

Zoë Cullen · Shengwu Li · Ricardo Perez-Truglia

This paper studies how salary benchmarking tools — products that reveal aggregate market pay statistics for specific job titles — affect employee compensation. The research question is whether firms' …

Christine Blandhol · John Bonney · Magne Mogstad · Alexander Torgovitsky

This paper asks: when does two-stage least squares (TSLS) with covariates actually estimate a local average treatment effect (LATE) — a non-negatively weighted average of causal effects for compliers …

Samuel Dodini · Anna Stansbury · Alexander Willén

This paper studies who bears the cost when unions raise worker wages — consumers, shareholders, other workers, or nobody, if productivity offsets the cost — using a legislative change in Norway that …

Nirupama L Rao · Max Risch

This paper asks how independent (pass-through) businesses in the United States accommodate minimum wage increases — specifically whether they reduce employment, compress profits, pass costs through to …

Gordon B. Dahl · Matthew Knepper

Dahl and Knepper address the long-standing puzzle of why workplace sexual harassment is chronically underreported despite high estimated prevalence. Survey evidence indicates that no fewer than 1 in …