American women are working more, through their sixties and even into their seventies. Their increased participation at older ages started in the late 1980s before the turnaround in older men's labor force participation and the economic downturns of the 2000s. The higher labor force participation...

A new lifecycle of women's employment emerged with cohorts born in the 1950s. For prior cohorts, lifecycle employment had a hump shape; it increased from the twenties to the forties, hit a peak and then declined starting in the fifties. The new lifecycle of employment is initially high and flat,...

This paper investigates the sources of the widely noticed reduction in the volatility of American business cycles since the mid 1980s. Our analysis of reduced volatility emphasizes the sharp decline in the standard deviation of changes in real GDP, of the output gap, and of the inflation...

Why do competitive firms in the US provide paid parental leave (PPL)? Which firms do and to what extent? We use several firm- and individual-level data sets to answer these questions. These include the BLS-Employee Benefit Survey (EBS) for 2010 to 2018 and an extensive firm-level data collection...

Gender-Based Taxation (GBT) satisfies Ramsey's rule of optimality because it taxes at a lower rate the more elastic labor supply of women. This holds when different elasticities between men and women are taken as exogenous. We study GBT in a model in which labor supply elasticities emerge...

We study employers' perceptions of the value of postsecondary degrees using a field experiment. We randomly assign the sector and selectivity of institutions to fictitious resumes and apply to real vacancy postings for business and health jobs on a large online job board. We find that a business...

We propose a test of bias based upon patterns of judicial errors. We model the trial court as minimizing a weighted sum of type I and II errors. We define racial bias a situation where the weight depends on defendant/victim race. If the court is unbiased, the error rate should be independent of...

This paper offers three results. First, in line with the previous literature, we confirm that fiscal adjustments based mostly on the spending side are less likely to be reversed. Second, spending based fiscal adjustments have caused smaller recessions than tax based fiscal adjustments. Finally,...

The present paper argues that the correct experiment to evaluate the effects of a fiscal adjustment is the simulation of fiscal plans rather than of individual fiscal shocks. The simulation of the fiscal plans adopted by 16 OECD countries over a 30-year period supports the hypothesis that the...