Knowledge that Transforms

This paper introduces a new IV strategy based on IVF (in vitro fertilization) induced fertility variation among childless women to estimate the causal effect of having children on their career. For this purpose, we use administrative data on IVF treated women in Denmark. Because observed chances of IVF success do not depend on labor market histories, IVF treatment success provides a plausible instrument for childbearing. Our IV estimates indicate that fertility effects on earnings are: (i) negative, large, and long-lasting; (ii) driven by fertility effects on hourly earnings and not so much on labor supply; and (iii) much stronger at the extensive margin than at the intensive margin.

This paper shows that employment in cohorts of US firms is strongly influenced by aggregate conditions at the time of their entry. Employment fluctuations of startups are procyclical, they persist into later years, and cohort-level employment variations are largely driven by differences in firm size, rather than the number of firms. An estimated general equilibrium firm dynamics model reveals that aggregate conditions at birth, rather than post-entry choices, drive the majority of cohort-level employment variation by affecting the share of startups with high growth potential. In the aggregate, changes in startup conditions result in large, slow-moving fluctuations in employment.

We extend search theory to multiple indivisible units and perfectly divisible assets, solving them respectively with induction and recursion. Buyer demands and prices are random, and the seller can partially exercise orders. With divisible assets, the Bellman value function is increasing and strictly concave, and the optimal reservation price falls in the position, reflecting increasing holding costs (opportunity cost of delaying optionality for inframarginal units). The marginal value exists, and is strictly convex with a falling purchase cap density. Our model is amenable to price-quantity bargaining; e.g., greater buyer bargaining power is tantamount to greater search frictions.

An evidence game is a strategic disclosure game in which an informed agent who has some pieces of verifiable evidence decides which ones to disclose to an uninformed principal who chooses a reward. The agent, regardless of his information, prefers the reward to be as high as possible. We compare the setup in which the principal chooses the reward after the evidence is disclosed to the mechanism-design setup where he can commit in advance to a reward policy, and show that under natural conditions related to the evidence structure and the inherent prominence of truth, the two setups yield the same outcome.

This paper studies the implications of individuals’ knowledge of future job loss for the existence of an unemployment insurance (UI) market. Learning about job loss leads to consumption decreases and spousal labor supply increases. This suggests existing willingness to pay estimates for UI understate its value. But it yields new estimation methodologies that account for and exploit responses to learning about future job loss. Although the new willingness to pay estimates exceed previous estimates, I estimate much larger frictions imposed by private information. This suggests privately traded UI policies would be too adversely selected to be profitable, at any price.

Researchers measure crowd-out around one level of charity output to identify whether giving is motivated by altruism and/or warm-glow. However, crowd-out depends on output, implying first that the power to reject pure altruism varies, and second that a single measurement of incomplete crowd-out can be rationalized by many different preferences. By instead measuring crowd-out at different output levels, we allow both for identification and for a novel and direct test of impure altruism. Using a new experimental design, we present the first empirical evidence that, consistent with impure altruism, crowd-out decreases with output.

Unemployment is high when financial discounts are high. In recessions, the stock market falls and all types of investment fall, including employers' investment in job creation. The discount rate implicit in the stock market rises, and discounts for other claims on business income also rise. A higher discount implies a lower present value of the benefit of a new hire to an employer. According to the leading view of unemployment—the Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model—when the incentive for job creation falls, the labor market slackens and unemployment rises. Thus high discount rates imply high unemployment.

In business and politics, gifts are often aimed at influencing the recipient at the expense of third parties. In an experimental study, which removes informational and incentive confounds, subjects strongly respond to small gifts even though they understand the gift giver's intention. Our findings question existing models of social preferences. They point to anthropological and sociological theories about gifts creating an obligation to reciprocate. We capture these effects in a simple extension of existing models. We show that common policy responses (disclosure, size limits) may be ineffective, consistent with our model. Financial incentives are effective but can backfire.

We develop a novel framework to analyze the structural implications of the marriage market for household consumption. We define a revealed preference characterization of efficient household consumption when the marriage is stable. We characterize stable marriage with intrahousehold (consumption) transfers but without assuming transferable utility. Our revealed preference characterization generates testable conditions even with a single observation per household and heterogeneous individual preferences across households. The characterization also allows for identifying the intrahousehold decision structure (including the sharing rule) under the same minimalistic assumptions. An application to Dutch household data illustrates the usefulness of our theoretical results.

We develop an equilibrium model of on-the-job search with ex ante heterogeneous workers and firms, aggregate uncertainty, and vacancy creation. The model produces rich dynamics in which the distributions of unemployed workers, vacancies, and worker-firm matches evolve stochastically over time. We prove that the surplus function, which fully characterizes the match value and the mobility decision of workers, does not depend on these distributions. This result means the model is tractable and can be estimated. We illustrate the quantitative implications of the model by fitting to US aggregate labor market data from 1951–2012. The model has rich implications for the cyclical dynamics of the distribution of skills of the unemployed, the distribution of types of vacancies posted, and sorting between heterogeneous workers and firms.