Knowledge that Transforms

Using administrative labor market data matched to mortality statistics and patient records, we document that negative labor market shocks produce sizable health spillovers in couples. For every 100,000 displaced men, there are 1,100 additional deaths. Of those, 60% accrue to the displaced worker, but 40% are due to excess spousal mortality. We find a stunning gender asymmetry: while male job displacement generates persistent negative health effects, no such dire consequences are observed after a woman’s job loss. We explore several explanations for these patterns: risk sharing through spousal labor supply; earnings losses and public insurance; widowhood; regional mobility and gender roles in the family.

This paper uses a manager-firm-worker matched dataset covering the entire Danish population to identify manager effects on worker wages. We show that manager-specific wage premiums are almost as important as firm-specific wage premiums in explaining betweenfirm wage inequality. Managers who pay higher wages are more likely to be replaced through acquisitions. Manager-specific wage premiums are uncorrelated with productivity and seem to stem from managers' traits and fairness views. Our results highlight the role of managers in understanding between-firm wage inequality and suggest that the managerial labor market tends to select low-paying managers and redistribute wealth from workers to shareholders.

We evaluate health insurance reclassification risk in the Small Group Market before ACA community rating regulations. We use detailed claims and premiums data from a large insurance company, controlling non parametrically for selection. We find a pass-through of 11% from changes in health risk to changes in premiums, with a stronger equilibrium relationship between the two. The pricing patterns are consistent with the insurer offering “guaranteed renewability” contracts with one-sided pricing commitment. The observed pricing policy adds 55% of the consumer welfare gain from community rating relative to experience rating, with welfare gains limited because of switching across insurance companies.

This article presents and analyzes an approach to cluster-based inference for dependent data. The primary setting considered here is with spatially indexed data in which the dependence structure of observed random variables is characterized by a known, observed dissimilarity measure over spatial indices. Observations are partitioned into clusters with the use of an unsupervised clustering algorithm applied to the dissimilarity measure. Once the partition into clusters is learned, a cluster-based inference procedure is applied to a statistical hypothesis testing procedure. The procedure proposed in the article allows the number of clusters to depend on the data, which gives researchers a principled method for choosing an appropriate clustering level. The article gives conditions under which the proposed procedure asymptotically attains correct size. A simulation study shows that the proposed procedure attains near nominal size in finite samples in a variety of statistical testing problems with dependent data.

This paper presents evidence that autocrats use state-owned firms to prevent unrest via employment provision, a role that helps explain these low-productivity firms' favorable treatment and persistence across settings. I use variation in a regional conflict in Xinjiang to establish that Chinese state firms respond to threats of ethnic unrest by hiring minority men. Concurrently, wages rise and private employment falls among this group. These patterns are consistent with a theoretical framework of governmentsubsidized, pacification-motivated state employment, and I use the framework to quantify the implicit subsidy that state firms receive for hiring male minorities.

This paper uses the randomized rollout of a national agricultural extension program in Uganda to study subsistence smallholders' decisions to adopt cash oilseed crops and shift to commercial farming. By eliciting yield and price expectations, we examine how beliefs evolve after the intervention and influence adoption decisions. Our findings indicate that technical and market information significantly raises farmers' expectations, leading to an average 15% increase in oilseed adoption. Results highlight the role of information in shaping beliefs and behavior, and suggest that addressing knowledge gaps and belief misperceptions about crop profitability is crucial for improving technology adoption and agricultural transformation.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) increases healthcare costs, hospital stays, and mortality. This study examines how AMR affects antibiotic prescribing for cystitis in France (2002–2019), using data from general practitioners. A decision model is developed to capture prescribing behavior with and without rapid bacterial or susceptibility testing. To address endogeneity, veterinary antibiotic sales are used as instruments. Results show rising resistance prompts drug substitution, and physicians respond to predictable resistance trends. Counterfactual analysis reveals that reducing animal antibiotic use and limiting fluoroquinolones lowers resistance but affects substitution and consumer welfare differently. The study also assesses the value of rapid diagnostic testing.

We estimate the effects of monetary policy shocks across local areas in the US and find substantial variation in their responses. There is a positive covariance of the price and employment effects of monetary policy across regions, and more sensitive regions are those with low per capita income. These patterns are consistent with New Keynesian models of a monetary union where regions have different shares of handto- mouth consumers. The model predicts that monetary policy shocks create large differences in consumption and real wages across space, and that heterogeneity across local areas amplifies the aggregate responses to shifts in monetary policy rates.

We show an equivalence result in the representative-agent New-Keynesian model after demand, wage-markup and correlated price-markup and TFP shocks: assuming sticky prices and flexible wages yields identical allocations for GDP, consumption, labor, inflation and interest rates to the opposite case—flexible prices and sticky wages. This equivalence arises with identical price and wage Phillips-curve slopes and generalizes to any slopes' pair whose sum and product are identical. Equilibrium profits and wages are, however, substantially different; equivalence breaks when these factor-distributional implications matter for aggregate allocations, e.g. in New-Keynesian models with heterogeneous agents, endogenous firm entry, and non-constant returns to scale.

We estimate the elasticity of vacancy duration with respect to posted wages, using data from the near-universe of online job adverts in the United Kingdom. Our research design leverages firm-level wage policies that are plausibly exogenous to hiring difficulties on specific job vacancies, and controls for job and marketlevel fixed-effects. Wage policies are defined based on external information on pay settlements, or on sharp, internally-defined, firm-level changes. In our preferred specifications, we estimate duration elasticities in the range −3 to −5, which are substantially larger than the few existing estimates.