This paper offers the first study of how changes in corporate R&D investment affect labor mobility. We show that increases in R&D spur employee departures to join start-ups’ founding teams. This appears to reflect employees taking the ideas, skills, or technologies created through the R&D process but not especially valuable to the R&D-investing firm to start-ups. The employee-founded start-ups tend to be outside the R&D-investing employer’s industry, suggesting that the underlying ideas would impose diversification costs on the R&D-investing firm. The start-ups are more likely to be VC backed, high tech, and high wage, pointing to substantial spillover benefits.

This paper obtains comparable estimates of the effect of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits on labor supply throughout the unemployment spell and over the business cycle using a regression kink design and 20 years of administrative data from California. For a given unemployment duration, the behavioral effect of UI benefit levels on labor supply does not vary with the business cycle from 2002 to 2019. However, due to increased coverage from extensions in benefit durations, the duration elasticity of UI benefits rises during recessions. The behavioral effect during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic is substantially lower at all unemployment durations.

Online university courses have become common, though some question whether the modality can adequately substitute for an in-person experience. We explore online course enrollment and student outcomes at a large public 4-year system. Online enrollment nearly doubled from 2012 to 2019. Female students and older students were especially likely to take online classes. Students earned more As and Fs in online courses, but semester grade point averages were higher in terms when students took at least one class online. Importantly, taking higher shares of courses online was associated with increased degree completion, with the largest benefits for younger students and male students.