Social Interactions in the Labor Market addresses the following questions: How do theoretical economic models and their associated econometric representations change when there are social interactions among households? How do policy implications change as the result of estimated households' social interactions? The authors present a unified theoretical and empirical representation of social interactions as they pertain to labor supply and demand and demonstrate the cases where current policy prescriptions are greatly altered by the presence of social interactions. Section 2 examines theoretically the effect of household interdependencies on how a researcher estimates and interprets labor supply and earnings equations. Having examined labor supply issues, Section 3 and give theoretical attention to labor demand. As a further demonstration how the presence of social interactions complicates thinking about economic policy the authors consider overall labor market outcomes and related economic policy further in Section 4 by examining theoretically the socially optimal wealth distribution. Section 5 measures local economic conditions by the county unemployment rate and neighborhood spillover effects by the racial makeup and poverty rate of the county. Lastly, Section 6 examines the econometric details of implementing an empirical model with possible social interactions in labor supply.

This paper estimates how effects of shocks to local labor demand on local labor market outcomes vary with initial local economic conditions. The data are on U.S. metro areas from 1979 to 2011. The paper finds that demand shocks to local job growth have greater effects in reducing local unemployment rates if the local economy is initially depressed than if the local economy is booming. Demand shocks have greater effects on local wage rates if the local unemployment rate is initially low, but lesser effects if local job growth is initially high. These different effects of local demand shocks imply that social benefits of adding jobs are two to three times greater per job in more depressed local labor markets, compared to more booming local labor markets.

Based on state-level labour market data from the Outgoing Rotation Group of the Current Population Survey from 1979 to 1997, discusses the wage and displacement effects of supply and demand shocks.

This paper estimates the effects on local labor market outcomes (employment rates, real wages, real earnings) of local labor demand shocks to different types of occupations. Occupations are divided into three groups, “high, middle, and low,” with occupations differing in wages paid and education credentials required. Effects are considered on both workers with less than a four-year college degree and workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher. The strongest benefits for labor market outcomes come from demand shocks to “mid jobs.” Mid-job demand shocks particularly benefit less-educated workers. High-job demand shocks often hurt labor market outcomes for less-educated workers, in part because such shocks push up local prices. Low-job demand shocks sometimes improve labor market outcomes for less-educated workers, and sometimes damage labor market outcomes for more-educated workers. Estimated labor demand effects also vary in different types of local labor markets. For example, when baseline local labor market conditions are tight (high baseline employment rate), less-educated workers gain more in real earnings from low-demand shocks, and lose more in real earnings from high-demand shocks.

While the most often-cited impacts of negative shocks to local labor market shocks are those to individuals' earnings and employment status, the repercussions of economic recession extend beyond these direct labor market effects. My dissertation research explores the effects of local labor market shocks and job displacement on families. Together, the three chapters of my dissertation contribute a better understanding of the overall welfare impacts of business cycle fluctuations. Chapter 1 examines the effect of local labor markets on fertility. To identify exogenous variation in male and female labor demand, I create indices that exploit cross-sectional variation in industry composition, changes in gender-composition within industries, and growth in national industry employment. Consistent with economic theory, I find that improvements in men's labor market conditions are associated with increases in fertility while improvements in women's labor market conditions have the opposite effect. I separately find that increases in unemployment rates are associated with small significant decreases in birth rates. In Chapter 2, I study the effect of business cycles on marriage and divorce rates. I find that increased unemployment is associated with small but significant reductions in both marriages and divorces. The results are robust to replacing general unemployment rates with alternative measures of state economic health, hold for both blacks and whites, and are concentrated among working-aged individuals. Timing analysis suggests that the effect of a shock to the unemployment rate on marriage rates is permanent, while the effect on divorce rates is temporary. In Chapter 3, Ann Stevens and I study the relationship between parental job loss and children's academic achievement using data on job loss and grade retention from the Survey of Income and Program Participation. We find that a parental job loss increases the probability of children's grade retention by 0.8 percentage points, or around 15 percent. After conditioning on child fixed effects, there is no evidence of significantly increased grade retention prior to the job loss, suggesting a causal link between the parental employment shock and children's academic difficulties. These effects are concentrated among children whose parents have a high school education or less.

"Most research on poverty focuses on the damage that persistent unemployment causes for individuals, families, and neighborhoods. But what happens when jobs are plentiful and workers are hard to come by? Persistent labor shortages became the norm in 2022, but there have been a number of periods in American history where tight labor markets prevailed. Moving the Needle examines what happens when conditions favorable to workers create market pressures that boost wages at the bottom, improve benefits, pull the unemployed from the sidelines to the center of a burgeoning job market, lengthen job ladders, and dampen credentialism. Utilizing 79 years of quantitative and historical data, as well as fieldwork among employers, jobseekers, and long-time residents of poor neighborhoods, this book explores how profoundly positive tight labor markets are for labor and recommends policies that would keep that momentum moving when the conditions that spur it forward no longer hold"--