Telephone operation, one of the most common jobs for young American women in the early 1900s, provided hundreds of thousands of female workers a pathway into the labor force. Between 1920 and 1940, AT&T adopted mechanical switching technology in more than half of the U.S. telephone network,...

Labor unions play a central role in the Democratic party coalition, providing candidates with voters, volunteers, and contributions, as well as lobbying policymakers. Has the sustained decline of organized labor hurt Democrats in elections and shifted public policy? We use the enactment of...

A lifecycle consumption profile with a hump of roughly the same relative size and peak location as empirical consumption profiles can be obtained in a general equilibrium model where mortality risk is the only active mechanism that can account for the hump. Moreover, the key preference...

Skinner's [1988. Risky income, life cycle consumption, and precautionary savings. Journal of Monetary Economics 22, 237-255] second-order approximation to the consumption function under CRRA utility is generalized to accommodate any structure of uninsurable income risk. To second order, a future...