The most common forms of government-mandated job displacement insurance are Severance Pay (SP; lump-sum payments at layoff) and Unemployment Insurance (UI; periodic payments contingent on nonemployment). While there is a vast literature on UI, SP programs have received much less attention, even...

A growing body of research shows that firms' employment and wage-setting policies contribute to wage inequality and pay disparities between groups. We measure the effects of these policies on racial pay differences in Brazil. We find that nonwhites are less likely to work at establishments that...

A growing body of evidence documents that policies can affect household behaviors persistently, even if they are no longer in place. This paper studies the importance of such "hysteresis" - the failure of an effect to reverse itself as its underlying cause is reversed - for the welfare...

It is widely believed that the presence of a large informal sector increases the efficiency cost of social programs - transfer and social insurance programs - in developing countries. We evaluate such claims for policies that have been heavily studied in countries with low informality -...

In the 1970s, large increases in the price of oil were associated with sharp decreases in output and large increases in inflation. In the 2000s, and at least until the end of 2007, even larger increases in the price of oil were associated with much milder movements in output and inflation. Using...

We characterize the macroeconomic performance of a set of industrialized economies in the aftermath of the oil price shocks of the 1970s and of the last decade, focusing on the differences across episodes. We examine four different hypotheses for the mild effects on inflation and economic...