This paper studies the link between hourly wages and workers' subjective assessments of how easy it would be to find another job as good as the present one, and how easy it would be for an employer to replace an employee. First, using high-quality data, I study the correlates of these two...

The importance of consumer confidence in stimulating economic activity is a disputed issue in macroeconomics. Do changes in confidence represent autonomous fluctuations in optimism, independent of information on economic fundamentals, or are they a reflection of economic news? I study this...

This paper uses tax rebate payments from the 2008 economic stimulus to estimate the effect of a one-time change in income on three measures of subjective well-being: life satisfaction, health satisfaction, and affect. The income effect is identified by exploiting the plausibly exogenous...

We estimate the effects on postsecondary education outcomes of the Kalamazoo Promise, a generous place-based college scholarship. We identify Promise effects using difference-indifferences, comparing eligible to ineligible graduates before and after the Promise's initiation. According to our...

In order to study whether public pension systems displace private saving, we use the quasiexperimental variation in pension wealth created by Poland's 1999 pension reform. Using the 1997-2003 Polish Household Budget Surveys, we begin by estimating "difference-indifferences" regressions, where we...

We estimate the earnings losses of a cohort of workers displaced during the Great Recession and decompose those long-term losses into components attributable to fewer work hours and to reduced hourly wage rates. We also examine the extent to which the reduced earnings, work hours, and wages of...

Phased retirement has been discussed as a means for increasing labour supply for people of older active age. The idea is that instead of leaving a full-time job early for full-time retirement, an employee should reduce the working time either in the same job or by changing jobs, and stay on in...

This paper uses tax rebate payments from the 2008 economic stimulus to estimate the effect of a one-time change in income on three measures of subjective well-being: life satisfaction, health satisfaction, and affect. The income effect is identified by exploiting the plausibly exogenous...