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...

Licensed workers could be shielded from unemployment during recession since occupational licensing laws are asymmetric--making unlicensed workers an illegal substitute for licensed workers but not the reverse. We test our hypothesis using a difference-in-differences event study research design...

How has the internet affected search and hiring, and what are the implications for aggregate unemployment? Answering these questions empirically has proven difficult due to selection in internet use and difficulty in measuring the search activities of both sides of the labor market. This paper...

We find expectations are more sensitive to economic growth than traditional wellbeing metrics. We examine Eurobarometer micro data from 1973-2023 on movements in life satisfaction along with data from 1995-2022 on five expectations variables on and individual's life and their financial and job...

There are 420 million young people in Africa today. Understanding how youth search for jobs and what affects their ability to find good jobs is of paramount importance. We do so using a field experiment tracking young job seekers for six years in Uganda's main cities. We examine how two standard...

We study the long-run consequences of losing a low-wage job using linked employer-employee wage records and household surveys. For full-time workers earning $15 per hour or less, job loss due to an idiosyncratic, firm-wide contraction generates a 13% reduction in earnings six years later and...

We introduce dynamic incentive contracts into a model of unemployment dynamics and present three results. First, wage cyclicality from incentives does not dampen unemployment dynamics: the response of unemployment to shocks is first-order equivalent in an economy with flexible incentive pay and...

We use a panel of survey responses linked to administrative data in Germany to measure the depreciation of skills while workers are unemployed. Both the reemployment hazard rate and reemployment earnings steadily fall with unemployment duration, and indicators of depression and loneliness rise...

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...