Can participation in safety net programs have long-lasting negative effects across multiple generations? Prior work shows a 1993 Dutch disability insurance reform which tightened requirements and lowered benefits for participants resulted in better outcomes for their children. We study the third...

Two million Mexicans were granted lawful permanent residency in the U.S. under the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA). We find that occupation and program use variables in a prominent proxy for legal status poorly detect this event. A decade after legalization, the share of...

This paper extends the literature on monopsony and labor market concentration by taking a task-based approach and estimating the causal effect of concentration in the demand for skills on labor market outcomes. The prior literature has focused on industry and occupation concentration and likely...

Using administrative data on health insurance, retirement, and leave benefits, we find within-firm variation accounts for a dramatically lower percentage of total variation in benefits than in wages. We also document sharply higher between-firm variation in nonwage benefits than in wages. We...

Using population-level administrative data, we study labor market externalities stemming from age-specific employment protection legislation (EPL) targeted towards older workers. Our results show no economically meaningful overall effects of the EPL on employment or earnings of either men or...

We document the sources behind the costs of job loss over the business cycle using administrative data from Germany. Losses in annual earnings after displacement are large, persistent, and highly cyclical, nearly doubling in size during downturns. A large part of the long-term earnings losses...

Most governments are mandated to maintain their economies at full employment. We propose that the best marker of full employment is the efficient unemployment rate, u*. We define u* as the unemployment rate that minimizes the nonproductive use of labor--both jobseeking and recruiting. The...

We propose that the natural rate of unemployment has an active role in the business cycle, in contrast to the prevailing view that the rate is essentially constant. We demonstrate that this tendency to treat the natural rate as near-constant would explain the surprisingly low slope of the...

This paper shows empirically that the non-employment effects of unemployment insurance (UI) for older workers depend in a first-order way on the structure of retirement policies. Using German data, we first present reduced-form evidence of these interactions, documenting large bunching in UI...

Principal-agent models take outside options, determining participation and incentive constraints, as given. We construct a general equilibrium model where workers' reservation wages and the maximum punishment acceptable before workers quit are instead determined endogenously. We simultaneously...