The effects of supply-side policies in depressed economies are controversial. We shed light on this debate using evidence from France in the 1930s. In 1936, France departed from the gold standard and implemented mandatory wage increases and hours restrictions. Deflation ended but output...

Was the $278 billion reboot of the $800 billion Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) in early 2021 disbursed equitably to minority communities? This paper provides the first analysis of how PPP funds were disbursed to minority communities in the third and final round of the program, which was...

Is healthcare employment recession proof? We examine the hypothesis that healthcare employment is stable across the business cycle. We explicitly distinguish between negative aggregate demand and supply shocks in studying how healthcare employment responds to recessions, and show that this...

Based on patterns of employment transitions, we identify three different types of workers in the US labor market: α's β's and γ's. Workers of type α make up over half of all workers, are most likely to remain on the same job for more than 2 years and, when they become unemployed, typically...

Previous research has documented that Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applications and awards increase during economic downturns and that expanded access to SSDI leads to a reduction in employment. We build on these insights and investigate to what extent differential access to SSDI...

We propose an approach to measuring the state of the economy via textual analysis of business news. From the full text of 800,000 Wall Street Journal articles for 1984-2017, we estimate a topic model that summarizes business news into interpretable topical themes and quantifies the proportion of...