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Labor Economics Commons

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2017

Selected Works

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Institution
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Articles 1 - 28 of 28

Full-Text Articles in Labor Economics

The 2008 Economic Stimulus Payments Increased Emotional Well-Being, Marta Lachowska Nov 2017

The 2008 Economic Stimulus Payments Increased Emotional Well-Being, Marta Lachowska

Marta Lachowska

No abstract provided.


Investing In America's Workforce 2017, Brad J. Hershbein Nov 2017

Investing In America's Workforce 2017, Brad J. Hershbein

Brad J. Hershbein

From the Day 3 Plenary Lunch of the Fed's Capstone Conference in Austin, TX -- Expanding the Capacity to Invest: Policy, Transparency and Accountability. Investments for workforce development require a foundation of institutional supports that will ensure accountability. This panel, representing diverse perspectives from the public, private and nonprofit sectors, explored the institutions, policies and norms needed to establish, reinforce and facilitate new and increased investments.


New Hires Quality Index, Brad J. Hershbein Nov 2017

New Hires Quality Index, Brad J. Hershbein

Brad J. Hershbein

No abstract provided.


Do Recessions Accelerate Routine-Biased Technological Change? Evidence From Vacancy Postings, Brad Hershbein, Lisa B. Kahn Nov 2017

Do Recessions Accelerate Routine-Biased Technological Change? Evidence From Vacancy Postings, Brad Hershbein, Lisa B. Kahn

Brad J. Hershbein

No abstract provided.


Partial Disability And Labor Market Adjustment: The Case Of Spain, José Ignacio Silva, Judit Vall Oct 2017

Partial Disability And Labor Market Adjustment: The Case Of Spain, José Ignacio Silva, Judit Vall

José Ignacio Silva


Although partially disabled individuals in Spain are allowed to combine disability benefits with a job, the empirical evidence shows that the employment rate of this group of individuals is very low because they have a much lower job finding and a higher job separation rates than nondisabled workers. Moreover, a decomposition analysis of the equilibrium employment rate shows that the differences in the job finding rates explain 85 percent of the disabled employment gap. To explain these facts, we construct a labor market model with search intensity and matching frictions to identify the incentives and disincentives to work in Spain …


Datos Para Replicar Los Cálculos Del Artículo "La Consar: Balanceando Los Intereses De Los Ahorradores Y Las Afores", Rodrigo Garcia-Verdu Sep 2017

Datos Para Replicar Los Cálculos Del Artículo "La Consar: Balanceando Los Intereses De Los Ahorradores Y Las Afores", Rodrigo Garcia-Verdu

Rodrigo Garcia-Verdu

Datos para replicar los cálculos del artículo "La CONSAR: balanceando los intereses de los ahorradores y las AFORES", con datos originales del Banco de México y de la Comisión Nacional del Seguro de Ahorro para el Retiro (CONSAR) de México. 


Evaluating Public Employment Programs With Field Experiments: A Survey Of American Evidence, Christopher J. O'Leary Sep 2017

Evaluating Public Employment Programs With Field Experiments: A Survey Of American Evidence, Christopher J. O'Leary

Christopher J. O'Leary

Research in the 1970s based on observational data provided evidence consistent with predictions from economic theory that paying unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to involuntarily jobless workers prolongs unemployment. However, some scholars also reported estimates that the additional time spent in subsidized job search was productive. That is, UI receipt tended to raise reemployment wages after work search among the unemployed. A series of field experiments in the 1980s investigated positive incentives to overcome the work disincentive effects of UI. These were followed by experiments in the 1990s that evaluated the effects of restrictions on UI eligibility through stronger work search …


Demonstration And Evaluation Of The Short-Time Compensation Program In Iowa And Oregon: Final Report, Susan Houseman, Christopher J. O'Leary, Katharine G. Abraham, Frank Bennici, Susan Labin, Richard Sigman Sep 2017

Demonstration And Evaluation Of The Short-Time Compensation Program In Iowa And Oregon: Final Report, Susan Houseman, Christopher J. O'Leary, Katharine G. Abraham, Frank Bennici, Susan Labin, Richard Sigman

Christopher J. O'Leary

Short-time compensation (STC) is an optional program within some state unemployment insurance (UI) systems that allows employers experiencing a temporary reduction in business to lower the average hours of employees in lieu of laying them off. Employer use of the STC option has been low in states with STC programs. We conducted demonstrations in Iowa and Oregon to evaluate the effectiveness of several interventions designed to increase employer awareness and use of STC, including disseminating information about STC to specific employers (members of the “treatment” group) over a 12-month period. The main findings support the hypothesis that lack of awareness …


Demonstration And Evaluation Of The Short-Time Compensation Program In Iowa And Oregon: Final Report, Susan Houseman, Christopher J. O'Leary, Katharine G. Abraham, Frank Bennici, Susan Labin, Richard Sigman Aug 2017

Demonstration And Evaluation Of The Short-Time Compensation Program In Iowa And Oregon: Final Report, Susan Houseman, Christopher J. O'Leary, Katharine G. Abraham, Frank Bennici, Susan Labin, Richard Sigman

All Star

Short-time compensation (STC) is an optional program within some state unemployment insurance (UI) systems that allows employers experiencing a temporary reduction in business to lower the average hours of employees in lieu of laying them off. Employer use of the STC option has been low in states with STC programs. We conducted demonstrations in Iowa and Oregon to evaluate the effectiveness of several interventions designed to increase employer awareness and use of STC, including disseminating information about STC to specific employers (members of the “treatment” group) over a 12-month period. The main findings support the hypothesis that lack of awareness …


A Frontline Decision Support System For Georgia Career Centers, Randall W. Eberts, Christopher J. O'Leary Aug 2017

A Frontline Decision Support System For Georgia Career Centers, Randall W. Eberts, Christopher J. O'Leary

All Star

The Workforce Investment Act (WIA) of 1998 emphasizes the integration and coordination of employment services. Central to achieving this aim is the federal requirement that local areas receiving WIA funding must establish one-stop centers, where providers of various employment services within a local labor market are assembled in one location. A major challenge facing staff in these centers is the expected large volume of customers resulting from relaxed program eligibility rules. Nonetheless, resources for assessment and counseling are limited. To help frontline staff in one-stop centers quickly assess customer needs and properly target services, the U.S. Department of Labor has …


Tackling Undeclared Work In Croatia: Knowledge-Informed Policy Responses, Colin C. Williams, Peter Rodgers, Ruslan Stefanov Aug 2017

Tackling Undeclared Work In Croatia: Knowledge-Informed Policy Responses, Colin C. Williams, Peter Rodgers, Ruslan Stefanov

Colin C Williams

KEY POINTS
Ø  Undeclared work has deep roots in Croatia. One in eleven declare to have done some fully undeclared work. Six out of ten though believe at least 20% of their compatriots violate tax and labour laws.
Ø  The perception of the widespread nature of undeclared work and the lack of trust in formal institutions seem to be the main incentives for people to engage in undeclared work. These have been exacerbated by high unemployment and low retirement income.
Ø  Hence, the conventional rational actor approach to tackling undeclared work that focuses upon increasing penalties …


The Current State Of Workers' Compensation: Benefit Adequacy, Return To Work, And Prevention, Marcus Dillender, H. Allan Hunt Aug 2017

The Current State Of Workers' Compensation: Benefit Adequacy, Return To Work, And Prevention, Marcus Dillender, H. Allan Hunt

H. Allan Hunt

No abstract provided.


Trust In Cohesive Communities, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof., Juan Escobar Assistant Professor Jul 2017

Trust In Cohesive Communities, Felipe Balmaceda Assoc Prof., Juan Escobar Assistant Professor

Felipe Balmaceda

This paper studies which social networks maximize trust and welfare when agreements are implicitly enforced. We study a repeated trust game in which trading opportunities arise exogenously and a social network determines the information each player has. We show that cohesive communities, modeled as social networks of complete components, emerge as the optimal community design. Cohesive communities generate some degree of common knowledge of transpired play that allows players to coordinate their punishments and, as a result, yield relatively high equilibrium payoffs. We also show that when news swiftly travel through the network, Pareto efficient networks are minimally connected: the …


Preventative Policy Measures To Tackle Undeclared Work In Croatia, Colin C. Williams Jul 2017

Preventative Policy Measures To Tackle Undeclared Work In Croatia, Colin C. Williams

Colin C Williams

This report examines the drivers of the undeclared economy in Croatia, the current organisation of the fight against undeclared work, and reviews the current and potential policy approaches and measures for tackling undeclared work in Croatia.
 
Drivers of the undeclared economy in Croatia
Recently, significant advances have been made in explaining the determinants of undeclared work. To explain undeclared work, it has been understood that every society has institutions which prescribe, monitor and enforce the ‘rules of the game’ regarding what is socially acceptable. In all societies, these institutions are of two types: formal institutions that prescribe ‘state morality’ …


New Evidence On State Fiscal Multipliers: Implications For State Policies, Timothy J. Bartik Jun 2017

New Evidence On State Fiscal Multipliers: Implications For State Policies, Timothy J. Bartik

Timothy J. Bartik

When state and local governments engage in balanced budget changes in taxes and spending, what fiscal multiplier effects do such policies have on creating local jobs? Traditionally, the view has been that possible job-creation effects of such state and local “demand-side” policies are smaller, second-order effects. Such effects might be worthwhile to take into consideration when a state or local government balances its budget during a recession, but the effects were believed to be of modest magnitude, and not of major importance for more general state and local public policies. However, recent estimates of fiscal multiplier effects of state and …


Data Improvement And Labor Economics, Kevin F. Hallock Jun 2017

Data Improvement And Labor Economics, Kevin F. Hallock

Kevin F Hallock

The expansion of available data for research has transformed empirical labor economics over the past generation. This paper briefly highlights some of the changes and describes a few examples of papers that illustrate the advances. It also documents the changing ways data have been used in the Journal of Labor Economics over the past 30 years, including a trend toward a higher fraction of papers using any data and, among those papers using any data, a higher fraction using nonpublic data, a higher fraction using international data, and more frequent use of multiple data sources. Finally, this paper describes work …


A Discussion Of Social Protection And Private Insurance, Gary S. Fields Jun 2017

A Discussion Of Social Protection And Private Insurance, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] This is a thoughtful and thought-provoking paper, informative and interesting. I learned a lot from reading this and have already passed it on to others. In my comments, I would like to do four things: highlight the major points and the rationale for them, raise a few quibbles, put forth some additional issues, and propose a possible resolution of a dilemma raised in the paper. But let us first try to be clear about what we are talking about. Professor Pestieau characterizes social insurance as being mandatory, universal, and redistributive. I would define it slightly differently: “Social insurance is …


[Review Of The Book Employment And Development: A New Review Of Evidence, By David Turnham], Gary S. Fields Jun 2017

[Review Of The Book Employment And Development: A New Review Of Evidence, By David Turnham], Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] I first encountered David Turnham’s work after majoring in labor economics in undergraduate and graduate school and spending a year in Nairobi studying and modeling the labor market there. The atmosphere in Kenya was crackling with intellectual excitement: John Harris and Michael Todaro had just showed how the solution to urban unemployment might be rural development, George Johnson had demonstrated that earnings function analysis ‘worked’ despite doubts about the quality of developing country data and the applicability of developed country concepts, Dharam Ghai was developing the basic human needs approach to development, and Joe Stiglitz was formulating efficiency wage …


Lifetime Migration In Colombia: Tests Of The Expected Income Hypothesis, Gary S. Fields Jun 2017

Lifetime Migration In Colombia: Tests Of The Expected Income Hypothesis, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

[Excerpt] People migrate and areas gain or lose population for a variety of reasons: differences in potential earnings, in job availability, in schooling opportunities, in quality of life, proximity to friends and relatives, and so on. The economic model of migration holds that the central factor determining individual migration decisions is the perceived opportunity to attain higher economic status. Area populations are expected to change differentially according to the economic opportunities offered. In empirical research in developed countries, economic factors have been shown to underlie most migration decisions. In developing countries, where the economic situation of the populace is far …


Merger & Acquisition And Capital Expenditure In Health Care: Information Gleaned From Stock Price Variation, Wenjing Ouyang, Peter E. Hilsenrath Jun 2017

Merger & Acquisition And Capital Expenditure In Health Care: Information Gleaned From Stock Price Variation, Wenjing Ouyang, Peter E. Hilsenrath

Peter E. Hilsenrath

Investment, especially through merger and acquisition (M&A), is a leading topic of concern among health care managers. In addition, the implications of this activity for organization and market concentration are of great interest to policy makers. Using a sample of 2256 firm-year observations in the health care industry during the period from 1985 to 2011, this article provides novel evidence that managers learn from financial markets in making capital expenditure (CAPEX) and M&A investment decisions. Within the industry, managers in the Drugs subsector are most likely to do so, whereas managers in the Medical Equipment and Supplies are least likely …


Crop Residues: The Rest Of The Story, Douglas L. Karlen, Rattan Lal, Ronald F. Follett, John M. Kimble, Jerry L. Hatfield, John A. Miranowski, Cynthia A. Cambardella, Andrew Manale, Robert P. Anex, Charles W. Rice Jun 2017

Crop Residues: The Rest Of The Story, Douglas L. Karlen, Rattan Lal, Ronald F. Follett, John M. Kimble, Jerry L. Hatfield, John A. Miranowski, Cynthia A. Cambardella, Andrew Manale, Robert P. Anex, Charles W. Rice

Douglas L Karlen

Synopsis In the February 15, 2009 issue of ES&T Strand and Benford argued that oceanic deposition of agricultural crop residues was a viable option for net carbon sequestration (43 [4], 1000−1007). In reviewing the calculations and bringing their experience to bear, Karlen et al. argue in this Viewpoint that crop residue oceanic permanent sequestration (CROPS) as envisioned by Strand and Benford will not work. They further propose alternative possibilities in agricultural methods to achieve a net decrease of CO2 emissions.


Workers' Compensation: Analysis For Its Second Century, H. Allan Hunt, Marcus Dillender May 2017

Workers' Compensation: Analysis For Its Second Century, H. Allan Hunt, Marcus Dillender

H. Allan Hunt

Hunt and Dillender review the status of workers' compensation programs on three critical performance areas: 1) the adequacy of compensation for those disabled in the workplace, 2) return-to-work performance for injured workers, and 3) prevention of disabling injury and disease.


Better Incentives Data Can Inform Both Research And Policy, Timothy J. Bartik May 2017

Better Incentives Data Can Inform Both Research And Policy, Timothy J. Bartik

Timothy J. Bartik

No abstract provided.


The Employment Service-Unemployment Insurance Partnership: Origin, Evolution, And Revitalization, David E. Balducchi, Christopher J. O'Leary Apr 2017

The Employment Service-Unemployment Insurance Partnership: Origin, Evolution, And Revitalization, David E. Balducchi, Christopher J. O'Leary

Christopher J. O'Leary

This study traces the origin and evolution of the partnership between the employment service and unemployment insurance programs in the United States. We examine objectives of the framers of the Wagner-Peyser and Social Security Acts that established these programs. Using primary sources, we then analyze early actions of the architects of social insurance to facilitate cooperation between the two programs to meet economic exigencies, grapple with political cronyism, and surmount legal barriers. We also discuss factors that caused changes in the employment service–unemployment insurance partnership over time. We identify reasons for the erosion in cooperation starting in the 1980s, and …


A New Panel Database On Business Incentives For Economic Development Offered By State And Local Governments In The United States, Timothy J. Bartik Mar 2017

A New Panel Database On Business Incentives For Economic Development Offered By State And Local Governments In The United States, Timothy J. Bartik

Timothy J. Bartik

No abstract provided.


Net Impact And Benefit-Cost Estimates Of The Workforce Development System In Washington State, Kevin Hollenbeck, Wei-Jang Huang Jan 2017

Net Impact And Benefit-Cost Estimates Of The Workforce Development System In Washington State, Kevin Hollenbeck, Wei-Jang Huang

Kevin Hollenbeck

No abstract provided.


Fertility And Female Labor Force Participation: The Role Of Legal Access To Contraceptives, Chaney Skadsen Dec 2016

Fertility And Female Labor Force Participation: The Role Of Legal Access To Contraceptives, Chaney Skadsen

Chaney Skadsen

No abstract provided.


Synthetic Control Estimation Beyond Case Studies: Does The Minimum Wage Reduce Employment?, David Powell Dec 2016

Synthetic Control Estimation Beyond Case Studies: Does The Minimum Wage Reduce Employment?, David Powell

David Powell

Panel data are often used in empirical work to account for fixed additive time and unit effects.  The synthetic control estimator relaxes the assumption of additive effects for case studies in which a treated unit adopts a single policy.  This paper generalizes the case study synthetic control estimator to estimate treatment effects for multiple discrete or continuous variables, jointly estimating the treatment effects and synthetic controls for each unit.  Applying the estimator to study the disemployment effects of the minimum wage for teenagers, I estimate an elasticity of -0.44, substantially larger in magnitude than estimates generated using additive fixed effects.