In response to the Great Recession, the availability of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits was extended to an unprecedented 99 weeks in many U.S. states in the 2009-2012 period. We use matched monthly data from the CPS to exploit variation in the timing and size of the UI benefit extensions...

Many Unemployment Insurance (UI) recipients do not find new jobs before exhausting their benefits, even when benefits are extended during recessions. Using SIPP panel data covering the 2001 and 2007-09 recessions and their aftermaths, we identify individuals whose jobless spells outlasted their...

Wage gaps between workers with a college or graduate degree and those with only a high school degree rose rapidly in the United States during the 1980s. Since then, the rate of growth in these wage gaps has progressively slowed, and though the gaps remain large, they were essentially unchanged...

We examine how a key provision of the Affordable Care Act--the expansion of Medicaid eligibility--affected health insurance coverage, access to care, and labor market transitions of unemployed workers. Comparing trends in states that implemented the Medicaid expansion to those that did not, we...

During the past two decades, union density has declined in the United States and employer provision of health benefits has undergone substantial changes in extent and form. Using individual data spanning the years 1983-1997, combined with establishment data for 1993, we update and extend...

This paper examines the effect of the different legal environments for bargaining faced by public employees across the states on wage and employment outcomes for union and nonunion employees, and also on the extent of bargaining, using cross-section, within-city, and longitudinal analyses based...

In the aftermath of World War II, the world's economies exhibited very different rates of economic recovery. We provide evidence that those countries that caught up the most with the U.S. in the postwar period are those that also saw an acceleration in the speed of adoption of new technologies....

This note accompanies the Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT) dataset. CHAT is an unbalanced panel dataset with information on the adoption of over 100 technologies in more than 150 countries since 1800. The data is available for download at: http://www.nber.org/data/chat We...

We introduce a tractable model of endogenous growth in which the returns to innovation are determined by the technology adoption decisions of the users of new technologies. Technology adoption involves an implementation investment that determines the initial productivity of a new technology....

We present evidence on the differences in the intensity with which ten major technologies are used in 185 countries across the world. We do so by calculating how many years ago these technologies were used in the U.S. at the same intensity as they are used in the countries in our sample. We...