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The author analyzes the effects of the expansion of broadband Internet access from 1999 to 2007 on labor market outcomes throughout the United States. Recent federal policy programs have allocated $18 billion toward subsidizing the spread of this technology, especially to rural areas. Understanding the interplay between technology, firms, and the labor market is important for evaluating whether additional scarce government resources should be allocated to improve this type of infrastructure. Using models that include county and time fixed effects, the author finds that gaining access to broadband services in a county is associated with approximately a 1.8 percentage point increase in the employment rate, with larger effects in rural and isolated areas. Most of the employment gains result from existing firms increasing the scale of their labor demand and from growth in the labor force. These results are consistent with a theoretical model in which broadband technology is complementary to skilled workers, with larger effects among college-educated workers and in industries and occupations that employ more college-educated workers.

This paper aims to identify the differences in the employment rate dynamics in economy sections, considering gender, in the European Union countries in 2020, compared to the 2008–2019 period. Two methods were used. The first method compares forecasts from models describing employment changes in the pre-pandemic periods with information concerning the actual employment rate in 2020, using three indices measuring the significance of the observed discrepancies. The second method uses dynamic cluster analysis for the 2008–2020 period, and evaluates the changes in composition of groups that occured in 2020. The proposed methods were applied separately to the data concerning the employment of females and males (employment rates) in the EU countries, always divided into economy sections and section groups (A, B-E, F, G-I, J, K, L, M and N, O-Q, R). The application of the “Triple 2 Rule” helped to identify the changes in the previous employment trends (“Interventions”). The evaluation of changes in the dynamics of the employment rate in total and in section groups and according to gender in the EU countries in 2020 – compared to the forecasts from the 2013–2019 trends – revealed that the EU labour market responded differently to the COVID-19 pandemic situation. First published online 14 March 2024

By the early 21st century, most high-income countries have put into effect a host of generous and virtually gender-neutral parental leave policies and family benefits, with the multiple goals of gender equity, higher fertility, and child development. What have been the effects? Proponents typically emphasize the contribution of family policies to the goals of gender equity and child development, enabling women to combine careers and motherhood, and altering social norms regarding gender roles. Opponents often warn that family policies may become a long-term hindrance to women's careers because of the loss of work experience and the higher costs to employers that hire women of childbearing age. We draw lessons from existing work and our own analysis on the effects of parental leave and other interventions aimed at aiding families. We present country- and micro-level evidence on the effects of family policy on gender outcomes, focusing on female employment, gender gaps in earnings, and fertility. Most estimates range from negligible to a small positive impact. But the verdict is far more positive for the beneficial impact of spending on early education and child care.

Despite improvements in labor market performance over the past decade, owing in part to past reforms, Italy's employment and productivity outcomes continue to lag behind those of its European peers. This paper reviews Italy's institutional landscape and labor market trends from a cross-country perspective, and discusses possible avenues for further reform. The policy discussion draws on international reform experience and on simulations based on a calibrated labor market matching model. A key lesson is that the details of reform design, and the sequencing of reforms, matter greatly for labor market outcomes and for the fiscal costs associated with these reforms.

We evaluate whether state-of-the-art macro models featuring indivisible labor are consistent with modern quasi-experimental micro evidence by synthesizing evidence on both the intensive and extensive margins. We find that micro estimates are consistent with macro estimates of the steady-state (Hicksian) elasticities relevant for cross-country comparisons on both the extensive and intensive margins. However, micro estimates of intertemporal substitution (Frisch) elasticities are an order of magnitude smaller than the values needed to explain business cycle fluctuations in aggregate hours by preferences. The key puzzle to be resolved is why micro and macro estimates of the Frisch extensive margin elasticity are so different.

This paper estimates the impact of electrification on employment growth by analyzing South Africa's mass roll-out of electricity to rural households. Using several new data sources and two different identification strategies (an instrumental variables strategy and a fixed effects approach), I find that electrification significantly raises female employment within five years. This new infrastructure appears to increase hours of work for men and women, while reducing female wages and increasing male earnings. Several pieces of evidence suggest that household electrification raises employment by releasing women from home production and enabling microenterprises. Migration behavior may also be affected.

Macroeconomic models of fluctuations in hours of work over the business cycle or across countries imply much larger labor supply elasticities than microeconometric estimates of hours elasticities. Understanding this divergence is critical for questions ranging from the sources of business cycles to the impacts of tax policy on growth and inequality. Macro models should be calibrated to match micro estimates of extensive margin elasticities in the same way that they are calibrated to match micro estimates of intensive margin elasticities. The size of the extensive margin responses depends on the density of the distribution of reservation wages around the economy's equilibrium. The same marginal density that determines the impacts of macroeconomic variation on aggregate employment also determines the impacts of quasi-experiments such as tax policy changes on employment rates.

We assess the strength of information spillovers relating unemployment duration of workers displaced by firm closures to their former colleagues’ current employment status. Displaced-specific networks are recovered from a 20-year panel of matched employer-employee data. Spillovers are identified by comparing performances of codisplaced workers. A one-standard-deviation increase in the network employment rate reduces unemployment duration by about 8%; the effect is magnified if contacts recently searched for a job and if their current employer is spatially and technologically closer to the displaced worker; stronger ties and lower competition for information favor reemployment. Several indirect tests exclude other interaction mechanisms.

This paper examines the dynamic implications of social networks for the labour market outcomes of refugees resettled in the U.S. A theoretical model of job information transmission shows that the relationship between social network size and labour market outcomes is heterogeneous and depends on the vintage of network members: an increase in network size can negatively impact some cohorts in a network while benefiting others. To test this prediction, I use new data on political refugees resettled in the U.S. and exploit the fact that these refugees are distributed across cities by a resettlement agency, precluding individuals from sorting. The results indicate that an increase in the number of social network members resettled in the same year or one year prior to a new arrival leads to a deterioration of outcomes, while a greater number of tenured network members improves the probability of employment and raises the hourly wage.

The employment-to-population ratio among prime-aged adults aged 25–54 has fallen substantially since 2000. The explanations proposed for the decline in the employment-to-population ratio have been of two broad types. One set of explanations emphasizes cyclical factors associated with the recession; the second set of explanations focuses on the role of longer-run structural factors. In this paper, we argue that while the decline in manufacturing and the consequent reduction in demand for less-educated workers put downward pressure on their employment rates in the pre-recession 2000–2006 period, the increased demand for less-educated workers because of the housing boom was simultaneously pushing their employment rates upwards. For a few years, the housing boom served to “mask” the labor market effects of manufacturing decline for less-educated workers. When the housing market collapsed in 2007, there was a large, immediate decline in employment among these workers, who faced not only the sudden disappearance of jobs related to the housing boom, but also the fact that manufacturing's steady decline during the early 2000s left them with many fewer opportunities in that sector than had existed at the start of the decade.