Employer learning provides a link between wage and employment dynamics. Workers who are selectively terminated when their low productivity is revealed subsequently earn lower wages. If learning is asymmetric across employers, randomly separated high-productivity workers are treated similarly when hired from unemployment, but recover as their next employer learns their type. I provide empirical evidence supporting this link, then study whether employer learning is an empirically important factor in wage and employment dynamics. In a calibrated structural model, learning accounts for 78 percent of wage losses after unemployment, 24 percent of life-cycle wage growth, and 13 percent of cross-sectional dispersion observed in data. (JEL D83, E24, J23, J24, J31, J62)
Along with health, Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) evaluates worklimiting disability by considering vocational factors including age, education, and past work experience. As the number of SSDI applicants and awards has increased, these vocational criteria are increasingly important to acceptances and denials. A unique state-level dataset allows us to estimate how these factors relate to the SSDI award process. These estimates are used to asses how changes to the demographic and occupational composition have contributed to awards trends. In our results, the prevalence of workers in their 50s are especially important. Further, increasing educational attainment lowers applications and vocational awards.
JEL CODES: E62, I13
Using retrospective data, we introduce evidence that occupational exposure significantly affects disability risk. Incorporating this into a general equilibrium model, social disability insurance (SDI) affects welfare through (i) the classic, risk-sharing channel and (ii) a new channel of occupational reallocation. Both channels can increase welfare, but at the optimal SDI they are at odds. Welfare gains from additional risk-sharing are reduced by overly incentivizing workers to choose risky occupations. In a calibration, optimal SDI increases welfare by 2.6% relative to actuarially fair insurance, mostly due to risk sharing.
JEL CODES: E62, I13
Government expenditures are procyclical in emerging markets and countercyclical in developed economies. We show this pattern is driven by differences in social transfers. Transfers are more countercyclical and comprise a larger portion of spending in developed economies compared to emerging. In contrast, government expenditures on goods and services are quite similar across the two. In a small open economy model, we fi nd disparate social transfer policies can account for more than a half of the excess volatility of consumption relative to output in emerging economies. We analyze how differences in tax policy and the nature of underlying inequality amplify or mitigate this result.
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