We show that the largest increase in unemployment benefits in U.S. history had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts. This finding has three implications. First, increased benefits were important for explaining aggregate spending dynamics--but not employment dynamics--during the...

Using data from the largest online job portal in Nigeria, we document: (a) gender differences in salary offers for jobs, and (b) the response of (a) to recessions. Jobs in industries where the number of job applicants skews female, offer lower starting salaries than jobs in industries where...

We develop a novel method for the identification of monetary policy shocks. By applying natural language processing techniques to documents that Federal Reserve staff prepare in advance of policy decisions, we capture the Fed's information set. Using machine learning techniques, we then predict...

We show that in Heterogeneous-Agent New-Keynesian (HANK) economies with countercyclical risk the natural interest rate is endogenous and co-moves with output, leaving the economy susceptible to self-fulfilling fluctuations. Unlike in Representative-Agent New-Keynesian models, the Taylor...

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...

Using data on U.S. state and federal taxes and transfers over a quarter century, we estimate a regression model that yields the marginal effect of any shift of market income share from one quintile to another on the entire post tax, post-transfer income distribution. We identify exogenous income...

Stock markets play a dual role: help allocate capital by conveying information about firms' fundamentals and provide liquidity by quickly turning stocks into cash. We propose a trading model in which these two roles are endogenously related: more intensive use of stocks for liquidity affects...

We find that procyclical stocks, whose returns comove with business cycles, earn higher average returns than countercyclical stocks. We use almost a three-quarter century of real GDP growth expectations from economists' surveys to determine forecasted economic states. This approach largely...

We develop a theory of labor markets with four features: search frictions, worker productivity shocks, wage rigidity, and two-sided lack of commitment. Inefficient job separations occur in the form of endogenous quits and layoffs that are unilaterally initiated whenever a worker's...