Knowledge that Transforms

The H

Society, and the Society of Labor Economists.For more than three decades, Janet has pioneered research on the role of education, family background, social transfer programs, access to health care, and environmental factors in shaping the health and well-being of children and their outcomes as adults.She was a prime mover in making the study of the fetal period and child development an essential concern of labor economics.This pioneering work had a major influence on other fields, including the economics of education, health economics, public economics, and environmental economics.In the early 1990s, Janet started a research agenda on the effectiveness of early childhood

Abstract We study the effects of uncertainty on time use and their macroeconomic implications. Employing data from the American Time Use Survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we document that heightened uncertainty increases housework and reduces market hours, mildly impacting leisure. We then propose a model that quantitatively accounts for these estimates. We show that substitution between market and housework provides self-insurance to households, weakening precautionary motives. However, it also reduces aggregate demand, ultimately amplifying uncertainty's recessionary impact. Time reallocation can lead to higher inflation, particularly when uncertainty is coupled with policies redirecting time use towards housework (e.g., lockdown restrictions).

Current Editorial Board:Treb Allen, Dartmouth CollegePierre Azoulay, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyWill Dobbie (Co-Chair), Harvard UniversityRaymond Fisman (Co-Chair), Boston UniversityBenjamin R. Handel, University of California, BerkeleyPeter Hull, Brown UniversityBrian A. Jacob, University of MichiganScott Kominers, Harvard UniversityTavneet Suri, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyStephen Terry, University of MichiganRecently Retired from the Editorial Board:Olivier Coibion, University of Texas, AustinDaniel Xu, Duke UniversityTable 1—Manuscripts Submitted and PublishedThis table shows the trends in papers submitted and published over the past five years. The journal saw increased growth in submissions of papers from 2019 to 2020. Submission numbers remained steady from 2020 to 2021, declined by 10% in 2022, and then remained steady from 2022 to 2023. The number of published papers increased by 25 in 2022 and an additional 17 papers in 2023 due to the publication of larger issues.Table 2—Status of Manuscripts by Year of Submission, 2019–2023This table shows the status of manuscripts submitted over the past five years. The number of papers summarily rejected has remained steady, ranging from 54% to 61% of papers submitted. The percent of papers sent out for review but ultimately rejected has also remained steady, ranging from 30% to 35% of papers. Acceptance rates range from 2% to 11% of papers submitted. Papers submitted in 2023 have not had enough time to reflect the acceptance rate.Table 3—Decision Time for Manuscripts Sent to Referees for ReviewThis table reports the decision time for manuscripts sent to referees for review over the past five years. The average decision time for papers that were sent to referees has remained steady, ranging from 82 to 95 days.Table 4—Distribution of First Decision Times, by Submission YearThis table includes all first-round paper submissions and shows the distribution of decision times in monthly increments for the past five years. This table also reflects the improvement in the journal's decision turnaround times. In 2023, 82% of manuscripts received a decision within three months and 99% within six months.Table 5—Subject Matter of Published Manuscripts, 2023This table shows the distribution of subject matter of papers published in 2023. These papers covered a variety of subjects, but the most common published topics were microeconomics; mathematical and quantitative methods; and health, education, and welfare. Table 1.Manuscripts Submitted and Published, 2019–2023YearSubmittedPublished20191,3306620201,6666520211,6746520221,4809020231,445107

Abstract Positive assortative matching increases both the wages of more productive workers and wage dispersion. We study the effect of immigration on positive assortative matching using French employer-employee data from 1995 to 2005. We find that increases in the share of immigrants, driven by historical networks across local labor markets, generated stronger positive assortative matching between workers and firms. We present evidence suggesting that this effect was associated to higher wages for more productive workers and that the findings are consistent with increased workers' screening by firms.

Abstract We report the results of a cost-effective intervention to improve workers' performance in small cassava processing firms in Ghana. We train workers to track their daily output and then randomly assign a sub-sample to set daily production goals. Achieving or missing a goal does not carry monetary consequences. Goal setting increases workers' output by 16%, their productivity by 8% and the average product of labor in firms by 13%. Goal setting is particularly effective for piece-rate workers, increasing their output by 32% and productivity by 24%. While not conclusive, evidence suggests that goals serve as a self-regulation device.

We use linked survey and administrative data to document differences across multiple socio-economic and demographic groups in the extent of adverse economic and health impacts of the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Across a wide set of characteristics-including race/ethnicity, education, industry, and occupation-the impacts of the pandemic on all-cause mortality and on employment were disproportionately concentrated in the same groups in the population. As the pandemic progressed, disparities in the pandemic's mortality impacts narrowed substantially between Black and White Americans and between Hispanic and White Americans, but persisted along the educational divide. For economic damages, only Hispanic-White disparities narrowed; Black-White and educational disparities persisted for the first two years of the pandemic. We also document greater mortality impacts for lower income individuals, with this negative income-excess mortality gradient becoming steeper in the pandemic's second year. Together our findings-using a consistent set of methods and measures on nationally representative data with a wide set of measures of socio-economic status-paint a detailed picture of the heterogeneous impacts of the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic on health and economic well-being.

Abstract We examine the intergenerational effects of an integration program that increased language training and improved labor market outcomes of adult immigrants in Finland. Exploiting a discontinuity in the phase-in rule of a reform, we find that parents' participation in the program improved their children's grades by 0.5 standard deviations and extended their educational attainment by over a year. Two decades post-arrival, children of the affected immigrants earned 42% more than their counterparts whose parents narrowly missed the policy's implementation.

Abstract We show how random subspace methods can be adapted to estimating local projections with many controls. Random subspace methods have their roots in the machine learning literature and are implemented by averaging over regressions estimated over different combinations of subsets of these controls. We document three key results: (i) Our approach can successfully recover the impulse response functions across Monte Carlo experiments representative of different macroeconomic settings and identification schemes. (ii) Our results suggest that random subspace methods are more accurate than other dimension reduction methods if the underlying large dataset has a factor structure similar to typical macroeconomic datasets such as FRED-MD. (iii) Our approach leads to differences in the estimated impulse response functions relative to benchmark methods when applied to two widely studied empirical applications.