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on Labour Economics |
| By: | Ana Figueiredo; Agnieszka Markiewicz; Elliott Weder |
| Abstract: | Using matched employer-employee data from the Netherlands, we decompose the wage penalty of temporary work. Temporary workers earn 28 log points less per hour than permanent workers. Worker fixed effects explain half this gap, while firm pay premia account for 28%. Most of the firm contribution reflects temporary workers sorting into low-paying firms rather than within-firm pay differences. As temporary employment differs substantially across demographic groups, we extend our framework to gender and native-migrant wage gaps, separating contract from firm sorting. Differential exposure to temporary work explains part of the native-migrant firm pay-premia gap but matters little for the gender wage gap. |
| Keywords: | Temporary employment; Firm pay premia; Wage inequality |
| JEL: | J31 J41 |
| Date: | 2026–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26240 |
| By: | Hélène Benghalem; Mirjam Bächli; Doriana Tinello; Sascha Zuber; Mauro Cherubini; Damaris Aschwanden; Matthias Kliegel; Rafael Lalive; Michele Pellizzari |
| Abstract: | Cognition is likely to be important for job search, but its role is not yet well understood. We study an online field experiment with jobseekers registered at the Swiss public employment services. Participants were randomly assigned to an online cognitive training program designed to strengthen core cognitive abilities and transversal cognitive abilities relevant for job search. Combining administrative and survey data on employment and earnings, we find that access to cognitive training substantially increases employment rates and earnings while reducing reliance on transfer income. In a simple search model, these findings could arise when cognition improves search effectiveness leading to lower search effort but higher chances of employment. |
| Keywords: | Unemployment, Online job search, Cognitive Training |
| JEL: | J64 J62 C93 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26226 |
| By: | N. Meltem Daysal; Joseph J. Doyle Jr.; Naeim S. Samandari; Emil A. L. Simonsen; Mircea Trandafir |
| Abstract: | Area-level measures of economic opportunity are increasingly used to guide place-based policies. We study whether these measures predict long-run outcomes for a vulnerable population: over 12, 000 refugee children quasi-randomly assigned to municipalities under Denmark's 1986–1998 dispersal policy. We focus on predetermined measures of opportunity available when children arrive and validate them using a mover-exposure design among permanent residents. Moving from a low- to a high-opportunity area (a two-standard-deviation increase) raises adult income rank by 3 percentile points (7.5 percent) and employment by 4 percentage points. It also reduces criminal convictions by 14 percent and teen parenthood by 19 percent, with more modest effects on educational attainment. Economic opportunity predicts crime and teen parenthood more strongly than other area characteristics, including local crime rates. For adult income, area-level inequality is a particularly strong predictor. These findings suggest that social mobility in the areas where refugee children grow up meaningfully shapes their long-term wellbeing. |
| JEL: | D63 J15 J62 R23 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35853 |
| By: | Leandro Carvalho; Sjoerd van Alten; Silvia Barcellos; Stephen Dorn; Titus Galama; Catharina A. Hartman; Qiongshi Lu; Dilnoza Muslimova |
| Abstract: | Personality is associated with economic outcomes, but whether these relationships are causal remains unclear. We exploit within-family variation in genetic propensity toward the Big Five generated by random genetic transmission from parents to offspring. Combining polygenic indexes from the Lifelines cohort study with 19 years of administrative tax records in the Netherlands, we find that greater genetic propensity toward emotional stability increases earnings and household wealth, while genetic propensity toward conscientiousness increases household wealth. The other three traits show no consistent pattern across outcomes and specifications. The effect of genetic propensity toward emotional stability on earnings remains positive as we progressively account for genetic propensity toward educational attainment, cognitive performance, and depression. These findings strengthen the evidence that personality causally affects earnings and wealth. |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2610.06088 |
| By: | Rajashri Chakrabarti; Philippe d'Astous; Kory Kroft; Sheisha Kulkarni; Vyacheslav Mikhed; Matthew J. Notowidigdo; Sahil Raina; Barry Scholnick |
| Abstract: | We estimate the causal effects of a financial windfall on consumption, savings, and wage earnings using linked administrative data on a large sample of Canadian lottery winners. Using separate linkages of lottery winners to income tax records and credit bureau data, we estimate how lottery winnings affect consumption measured through credit card spending, savings through financial asset accumulation and debt repayment, and wage earnings from tax records. We then examine how these responses vary across the income distribution. We find that high-income individuals allocated a larger share of lottery winnings to savings and leisure, while low-income individuals spent a larger share on consumption. We illustrate the policy relevance of these heterogeneous responses through three applications: designing fiscal stimulus programs, evaluating a Universal Basic Income (UBI), and determining optimal top tax rates on wage earnings and savings. |
| JEL: | D15 H2 J22 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35836 |
| By: | Simon Quach |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the labor market effects of overtime coverage in the United States, where salaried workers are covered for overtime if their base pay falls below a legislated salary threshold. Using an event-study design with administrative payroll data and state-level threshold changes from 2014-2021, I find evidence against conventional models of overtime. Contrary to the historical intent of policymakers, firms do not increase employment by substituting more workers for fewer hours. However, contrary to compensating differential models, firms also do not offset the costs of overtime by lowering workers' base pays. Instead, employers raised salaries above the threshold to keep workers exempt from overtime, indicating that monitoring and adjusting workers' hours is costly for firms. Taken together, these results suggest that expanding overtime coverage increases workers' earnings without negatively impacting employment. |
| Keywords: | overtime, Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), salary threshold, labor regulation, hours of work, salaried vs hourly employment, bunching |
| JEL: | J08 J23 J38 |
| Date: | 2026–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:crm:wpaper:26222 |
| By: | István Boza (ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies); László Czaller (Corvinus University of Budapest; ELTE Centre for Economic and Regional Studies) |
| Abstract: | This paper examines how workers and employers jointly shape spatial wage disparities across Hungarian local labor markets. We combine longitudinal linked employer–employee administrative data for 2012–2022 with functional local labor markets constructed from district-to-district commuting flows in the 2022 Hungarian Census. Our preferred delineation contains 29 commuting zones and raises the share of employed residents working within the same unit above 90 percent, compared with 72 percent for districts and 81 percent for counties. We estimate an additive worker–employer fixed-effect wage model and decompose wage variation at the individual level, between commuting zones, and within commuting zones. Differences in commuting-zone mean wages account for 2.8 percent of national log-wage variance and 1.1 percent when the Budapest commuting zone is excluded. Although the between-zone component is modest, its structure is systematic: zones with higher average worker effects also tend to have higher average employer wage premia, so the spatial alignment of worker and employer components accounts for an important part of spatial wage differences. Wage dispersion and the relative importance of worker heterogeneity, employer premia, and worker–employer sorting within local labor markets also vary substantially across the country. The results indicate that spatial wage disparities in Hungary reflect not only differences in workers’ earnings potential and the employer premia attached to their jobs, but also how these components are combined across local labor markets. |
| Keywords: | commuting zones; regional wage inequality; linked employer–employee data |
| JEL: | J31 R12 R23 C23 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:has:discpr:2615 |
| By: | Andreas Mense; Wolfgang Dauth; Matthias Wrede |
| Abstract: | We investigate the employment effects of job access within cities. To overcome the endogeneity of residential location choices, we exploit the quasi-random allocation of applicants across affordable housing units in five German cities and propose a novel IV strategy. Our job access measure combines proximity to jobs in both geographical and skill space, taking into account potential competition from other workers. We compile a unique administrative dataset comprising the complete labor market biographies of individuals who moved into affordable housing. A one-standard-deviation increase in job access reduces the unemployment hazard of unskilled workers by 3.4 percentage points. We do not find similar effects for skilled workers, who are more likely to own a car and are therefore less geographically constrained. Simulations show that full segregation, with all unskilled allocated to central neighborhoods, would reduce the city-wide unemployment rate of the largest city in our sample, Munich, by 1.3 percentage points. |
| Keywords: | job access, unemployment, urban labor markets, labor supply, affordable housing |
| JEL: | I31 I38 J13 R23 R38 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_13040 |
| By: | Richard Blundell; Monica Costa-Dias; Graham Mazeine; Costas Meghir; Tom Waters |
| Abstract: | Work experience has been found to be a key determinant of work and wages for educated women, but it seems to play a smaller role for the less educated. For them, welfare, tax credits and family composition matter more, and increasingly so does participation in disability programmes. Here we document how labor supply, wages, health, and disability claims have evolved in the UK over the last three decades, and examine how reforms to tax credits, disability benefits and other welfare programs have changed work incentives over this period. We then introduce these features into an empirical dynamic structural model of life-cycle labor supply, human capital and disability benefit application, in which human capital combines health capital, experience accumulated in work, and education. Estimating the model on a panel of working-age women in the UK, we examine the interactions between experience capital and health capital in driving life-cycle earnings across different education groups. Our results highlight the importance of interactions in the disability benefit, welfare and tax-credit systems for understanding the life cycle pattern of hours, employment, earnings, and disability claims, and for evaluating policy counterfactuals. |
| JEL: | D15 D31 H24 H31 I14 I3 J14 J22 J31 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35861 |
| By: | Ran Abramitzky; Jacob Conway; Roy Mill; Luke C. D. Stein |
| Abstract: | We study differences in economic outcomes by perceived skin tone among African Americans using full-count U.S. decennial census data from the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Comparing children coded as "Black" or "Mulatto" by census enumerators and linking these children across population censuses, we first document large gaps in educational attainment and income among African Americans with darker and lighter perceived skin tones. To disentangle the drivers of these gaps, we identify all 35, 992 families in which enumerators assigned same-gender siblings different Black/Mulatto classifications. Relative to sisters coded as Mulatto, sisters coded as Black had lower educational attainment, were less likely to marry, and had less-educated, likely lower-earning husbands. These patterns are consistent with more severe contemporaneous discrimination against African American women with darker perceived skin tones. In contrast, we find similar educational attainment, marital outcomes, and incomes among differently-classified brothers. Men perceived as African Americans of any skin tone faced similar contemporaneous discrimination, consistent with the "one-drop" racial classification rule that grouped together individuals with any known Black ancestry. Lower incomes for African American men perceived as having darker skin tone in the general population were driven by differences in opportunities and resources that varied across families, likely reflecting the impacts of historical or family-level discrimination. |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2610.10606 |
| By: | Pedro Carneiro (Institute for Fiscal Studies); Kjell G. Salvanes (Institute for Fiscal Studies); Barton Willage (University of Delaware); Alexander Willén (Norwegian School of Economics) |
| Date: | 2026–10–08 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ifs:ifsewp:26/61 |
| By: | David Card; Laura Giuliano |
| Abstract: | We study an accelerated 3-year math curriculum offered in the middle schools of a large urban district that enables students to finish Algebra I and Geometry before high school. Entry to the program is based on 5th-grade math test scores, with a cutoff at the 80th percentile. Continuing eligibility requires at least a B grade in the previous year; successful completion of all three years is highly correlated with an index of non-cognitive skills. Following students for 6 years after high school graduation, we find that the impacts of admission vary widely by non-cognitive skill and gender. Marginally eligible boys with high non-cognitive skills have a 33 percentage point (ppt.) increase in the probability of completing calculus by 11th grade and a 12 ppt. increase in the probability of completing a major in STEM or business within 6 years; boys with lower noncognitive skills take more advanced math classes in high school but have no significant effects on their college outcomes. Like their male peers, marginally eligible girls with high non-cognitive skills are more likely to complete calculus by 11th grade (+17 ppt.). Their rate of graduating with a STEM or business major is unaffected, but they switch from social sciences to the core STEM majors (science, engineering and math). Girls in the two lower terciles of non-cognitive skill are also strongly affected by entry to the program, with higher participation in advanced math classes in high school, higher rates of entry to selective 4-year colleges, and higher rates of completing a STEM or business major (+12 ppt). |
| JEL: | I21 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35847 |
| By: | Andrew C. Barr; Laura Kawano; Bruce Sacerdote; Michael Stevens |
| Abstract: | The COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharp initial rise in unemployment, followed by an unexpectedly tight labor market. Using a panel of tax data containing newly assembled information on worker occupation, we document persistent labor force exit, especially among low-income and low-skill workers. Low-skilled unmarried men are by far the most likely to exit, reinforcing recent concerns regarding the economic and social engagement of this group. Contrary to prevailing theories, we find little evidence that school closures, virus exposure, stimulus payments, or unemployment benefits explain these exits. Nor is the exit explained by additional upgrading of occupations or firm quality. Individuals who leave the labor force do not (on average) make up the missing income; however, self-employment income replaces roughly a quarter of the lost W-2 income. The facts suggest that the willingness to work for low pay decreased and preferences for leisure and job flexibility increased among a large set of workers who have found ways to get by with less income. These results have implications for tax policy, fiscal projections, and labor market dynamics in the post-pandemic economy. |
| JEL: | J01 J2 |
| Date: | 2026–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:35856 |