Organizations & Markets

We show that a rise in the minimum wage accounts for a large decline in earnings inequality in Brazil since 1994. To this end, we combine rich administrative and survey data with an equilibrium model of the Brazilian labor market. Our results imply that the minimum wage has far-reaching spillover effects on wages higher up in the distribution, accounting for one-third of the 25.9 log point fall in the variance of log earnings in Brazil since 1994. At the same time, the minimum wage's effects on employment and output are muted by reallocation of workers toward more productive firms.

This article describes randomized field experiments implemented on two online labor market platforms examining the effect of employer charitable giving on a source of human capital that is becoming increasingly important to firms: the gig worker. It provides support that a message about charitable giving increases gig workers' willingness to complete extra work, and that pro-socially oriented gig workers are most responsive.

We estimated the effects of information avoidance and information seeking among parents of children diagnosed with ASD on age of diagnosis. An online survey was completed by 1,815 parents of children with ASD. Children of parents who self-reported that they had preferred "not to know," reported diagnoses around 3 months later than other children.

The covered interest rate parity (CIP) condition is a fundamental arbitrage relationship in international finance. In this chapter, we review its breakdown during the Global Financial Crisis and its continued failure in the subsequent decade. We review how to measure CIP deviations, discuss the drivers of CIP deviations, and the implications of CIP deviations for global financial markets.

We investigate risk and return in the major corporate bond markets of the developed world. We find that average returns increase with maturity and ratings class (where ratings go from high to low) and that this pattern is fit well by a global CAPM model, where the market consists of equity, sovereign and corporate bonds. Nonetheless, we strongly reject "asset class integration," finding a model which separates the market portfolio into its three components to fit much more of the corporate bond return variation.

We designed and fielded a survey of New York and Pennsylvania firms to study the impacts of New York's 2018 Paid Family Leave policy on employer outcomes. We match each NY firm to a comparable PA firm and use difference-in-difference models to analyze within-match-pair changes in outcomes. We find that PFL leads to an improvement in employers' rating of their ease of handling long employee absences, concentrated in the first policy year and among firms with 50-99 employees. We also find an increase in employee leave-taking in the second policy year, driven by smaller firms.

We construct a new measure of voluntary disclosure based on firms’ websites. Using the Wayback Machine, we create a standardized measure of disclosure capturing the quantity of information on firms’ websites. We validate our measure by documenting that it is positively associated with established measures of firms’ voluntary disclosure and liquidity. Importantly, we document that our measure, while correlated with established disclosure measures, is not subsumed by those measures. It complements existing measures in three important ways.

We develop a general equilibrium model of frictional labor reallocation across firms and regions, and use it to quantify the aggregate and distributional effects of spatial frictions that hinder worker mobility across regions in Germany. The model leverages matched employer-employee data to unpack spatial frictions into different types while isolating them from labor market frictions that operate also within region.

Many workers in large factories in developing countries are internal migrants from rural areas. We develop a model in which migrants are poorly informed about working conditions upon beginning work but learn more as they gain experience in the industry. We then examine the relationship between workers' migration status and the working conditions they face in a household survey of garment workers in Bangladesh.