How does the publication of patents affect innovation? We answer this question by exploiting a large-scale natural experiment--the passage of the American Inventor's Protection Act of 1999 (AIPA)--that accelerated the public disclosure of most U.S. patents by two years. We obtain causal...

It has long been argued that a minimum wage could alleviate efficiency losses from monopsony power. In a general equilibrium framework that quantitatively replicates results from recent empirical studies, we find higher minimum wages can improve welfare, but most welfare gains stem from...

For whom has earnings risk changed, and why? To answer these questions, we develop a filtering method that estimates parameters of an income process and recovers persistent and temporary earnings for every individual at every point in time. Our estimation flexibly allows for first and second...

The effect of coworkers on the learning and the productivity of an individual is measured combining theory and data. The theory is a frictional equilibrium model of the labor market in which production and the accumulation of human capital of an individual are allowed to depend on the human...

How does consumer credit access impact job flows, earnings, and entrepreneurship? To answer this question, we build a new administrative dataset which links individual employment and entrepreneur tax records to TransUnion credit reports, and we exploit the discrete increase in consumer credit...

We empirically and theoretically examine how consumer credit access affects displaced workers. Empirically, we link administrative employment histories to credit reports. We show that an increase in credit limits worth 10% of prior annual earnings allows individuals to take .15 to 3 weeks longer...

While the labor market implications of mergers have been historically ignored as "out of market" effects, recent actions by the Department of Justice (DOJ) place buyer market power (i.e., monopsony) at the forefront of antitrust policy. We develop a theory of multi-plant ownership and monopsony...

We contribute a theory in which three channels interact to determine the degree of monopsony power and therefore the wedge between a worker's spot wage and her marginal product (henceforth, the wage markdown): (1) heterogeneity in worker-firm-specific preferences (nonwage amenities), (2) firm...

This paper studies the welfare effects of unemployment insurance (UI) in low-income countries characterized by high levels of informality, weak enforcement of UI claims, and job search frictions. We assess the impact of UI on workers' welfare in the presence of moral hazard and liquidity...

We combine the Decennial Census, credit reports, and administrative earnings to create the first panel dataset linking parent's credit access to the labor market outcomes of children in the U.S. We find that a 10% increase in parent's unused revolving credit during their children's adolescence...