At the turn of the 20th century, state and local governments in the United States began to establish public employment offices. These non-profit governmental organizations match job seekers and businesses, one of their main objectives being to protect job seekers from fraudulent activities by...

Federal and state employment programs for low-skilled workers typically emphasize rapid placement of participants into jobs and often place a large fraction of participants into temporary-help agency jobs. Using unique administrative data from Detroit's welfare-to-work program, we apply the...

This paper reports the results from a randomized experiment designed to evaluate the direct and indirect (displacement) impacts of job placement assistance on the labor market outcomes of young, educated job seekers in France. We use a two-step design. In the first step, the proportions of job...

New gastroenterologists participated in a labor market clearinghouse (a quot;matchquot;) from 1986 through the late 1990's, after which the match was abandoned. This provides an opportunity to study the effects of a match, by observing the differences in the outcomes and organization of the...

We show that administrative hourly wage data exhibits considerable bunching at round numbers that cannot be explained by rounding of survey respondents. We consider two explanations—worker left-digit bias and employer optimization frictions. We experimentally rule out left-bunching by...

This paper examines New York City's Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP). SYEP provides jobs to youth ages 14-24, and due to high demand for summer jobs, allocates slots through a random lottery system. We match student-level data from the SYEP program with educational records from the NYC...

On-demand labor platforms make up a large part of the “gig economy.” We quantify the extent of monopsony power in one of the largest on-demand labor platforms, Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), by measuring the elasticity of labor supply facing the requester (employer) using both observational...

Workers and jobs are naturally heterogeneous and the quality of their interaction when paired is difficult to forecast. The Internet promises to open new channels for worker-firm communications. What are the consequences of this opening? I discuss three labor market features that may be altered:...

During 1984-96, welfare and tax policy changed dramatically. The Earned Income Tax Credit was expanded, welfare benefits were cut, welfare time limits were added and cases were terminated, Medicaid for the working poor was expanded, training programs were redirected, and subsidized or free child...

The British New Deal for Young People began in January 1998. After 6 months of unemployment, 18-24 year olds are mandated to enter a `Gateway' period where they are given extensive job search assistance. If they are unable to obtain an unsubsidised job, then they can enter one of four New Deal...