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There has been an ever-growing stream of books, pamphlets and articles on how to achieve and maintain employment, as of September 1944. It has become quite impossible for economists to read all these recipes, mainly because they all say more or less the same thing. They nearly all agree that the way to keep up the level of national employment is to keep up the level of national expenditure. In one way and another, national expenditure was permitted to increase in a number of countries, and some measure of recovery was achieved in the process. The reason for the recovery was not always understood, it was attributed to cheap money, an unbalanced budget, raising of tariffs, devaluation of the currency, increasing the general price level and so on, by the countries adopting these various measures. It was not realized that it was only in so far as the measures taken involved an increase in the total volume of spending in the country concerned that they could raise its level of employment at all and that in itself a rise in prices, far from promoting recovery, diminished the effect in stimulating employment of a given increase in spending. The article talks about the recent British government report on employment policy. There is nothing particularly novel about any of the measures recommended in the policy, nor do they involve any revolutionary change in economic practice or organization. What is new is, first, that the government there accept as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment and second, that the various measures proposed are commended as part of a single coherent plan.

This paper builds a new microdatabase that covers 100 countries at all income levels and long-run time series in the United States (1870–2010) and Mexico (1960–2010) to document how the modern tax system arises over development. I establish a new set of stylized facts, which show that the income tax exemption threshold decreases in the income distribution as a country develops, tracking growth in the employee share of employment that occurs gradually further down the income distribution. Additional evidence supports the interpretation that the rise in third-party covered income through increases in employee share drives expansions of the income tax base over development. (JEL D31, H23, H24, H71, J22, J23, N40) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents abstracts of papers which were published in the July 1965 issue of "Review of Economic Studies." In the model postulated in the paper "The Relationship Between Output and Employment in British Manufacturing Industries," businessmen are assumed to treat their output, capital and technology as exogenous in the short run. The endogenous variables are the level of employment and the effective number of hours worked per man. In the paper "Business Saving and Errors in Variables," cross-section, double-logarithmic, least squares regressions of business saving on profit are estimated for samples of companies drawn from the brewing and textiles industries, and from manufacturing industry as a whole, in Great Britain for each year 1949-63. The paper "Optimum Growth in an Aggregative Model of Capital Accumulation" elaborates the problem of optimum saving first discussed by F. Ramsey in 1928. For this purpose a centralized, closed economy is postulated; it is assumed to be adequately described by the aggregative, neoclassical model first closely analyzed by R. M. Solow. According to the paper "Entry in a Cournot Market," the theory of Cournot equilibrium was developed as a general theory with perfect competition and monopoly as special limiting cases. According to Cournot, as the number of firms in an industry increases, industry output increases, the output of any one producer becomes a smaller proportion of total industry output, price falls, and in the limit price and output approach that of a perfectly competitive market.

This paper establishes a new fact about the compositional changes in the pool of unemployed over the US business cycle. Using microdata from the Current Population Survey for the years 1962-2012, it documents that in recessions the pool of unemployed shifts toward workers with high wages in their previous job and that these shifts are driven by the high cyclicality of separations for high-wage workers. The paper finds that standard theories of wage setting and unemployment have difficulty in explaining these patterns and evaluates a number of alternative theories that do better in accounting for the new fact. (JEL E24, E32, J31, J63, J64) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier work (Kamada and Kojima 2015), we introduced 'matching with constraints,' a two-sided matching problem in which the market is subject to feasibility constraints. That paper proposed and analyzed a possible solution to this problem and discussed various real-market applications of our results. The present paper reorganizes some of the findings from our more recent effort, based on Kamada and Kojima (2016a, b). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section presents abstracts of studies on labor economics which were published in the October 1964 issue of The Review of Economic Studies. The paper titled The Determinants of Wage Rate Changes and the Inflation-Unemployment Trade-off for the U.S., by G. L. Perry, presents empirical estimates from a model explaining the behavior of average wage rates. The paper titled Wage Structure and Structural Unemployment, by M. Reder, explains that wage structures and employment structures are correlative concepts and must be studied as an inter-related system. The paper titled The Wage-Price Process in Modern Industry, by Otto Eckstein, presents a theory of the wage-price process in manufacturing industry which is derived from the growing volume of empirical results on wage determination, productivity behavior and price formation.

This paper, written by the members of the American Economic Association (AEA) Ad Hoc Committee on the Job Market, provides an overview of the market for new Ph.D. economists. It describes the role of the AEA in the market and focuses in particular on two mechanisms adopted in recent years at the suggestion of our Committee. First, job market applicants now have a signaling service to send an expression of special interest to up to two employers prior to interviews at the January Allied Social Science Associations (ASSA) meetings. Second, the AEA now invites candidates who are still on the market, and employers whose positions are still vacant, to participate in a web-based 'scramble' to reduce search costs and thicken the late part of the job market. We present statistics on the activity in these market mechanisms and present survey evidence that both mechanisms have facilitated matches. The paper concludes by discussing the emergence of platforms for transmitting job market information and other design issues that may arise in the market for new economists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is hard to find a negative effect on the employment effect of rises in the minimum wage: the elusive employment effect. It is much easier to find an impact on wages. This paper argues the elusive employment effect is unlikely to be solved by better data, methodology, or specification. The reasons for the elusive employment effect are the factors contributing to why the link between higher minimum wages and higher labor costs are weaker than one might think and because imperfect competition is pervasive in the labor market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employment may be important to well-being for reasons beyond its role as an income source. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value of employment in refugee camps in Bangladesh. We involve 745 individuals in a field experiment with three arms: a control arm, a weekly cash arm, and an employment arm of equal value. Employment raises psychosocial well-being substantially more than cash alone, and 66 percent of the employed are willing to forgo cash payments to continue working temporarily for free. Despite material poverty, those in our context both experience and recognize a nonmonetary, psychosocial value to employment. (JEL C93, D91, I31, J15, J22, O15) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the existence and characteristics of US firms that do not manufacture themselves, but nonetheless are heavily involved in the production of goods. These factoryless goods producing firms (FGPFs) are formally in the wholesale sector but, unlike traditional wholesale firms, FGPFs design the goods they sell and coordinate production activities. FGPFs in the wholesale sector are larger and younger, pay higher wages, span more sectors and had more manufacturing employment in previous years compared to traditional wholesalers. FGPFs are more likely to import than typical wholesalers, though their imports constitute a smaller share of their total domestic activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lewis model has remained, for more than half a century, one of the dominant theories of development economics. This paper argues that the power of the model lies in the simplicity of its central insight: that poor countries contain enclaves of economic activity just as rich countries contain enclaves of poverty; and that a proximate explanation for the difference in income per capita across countries is that there are large differences in the relative sizes of their 'modern' and 'traditional' sectors. But while the Lewis model contains a powerful and compelling macro narrative, its details have proved somewhat elusive to scholars and students who have followed, and its policy implications are unclear. This paper identifies several key insights of the Lewis model, discusses several different interpretations of the model, and then reviews modern evidence for the central propositions of the model. In closing, we consider the relevance of Lewis for current thinking about development strategies and policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents discussions by economists on papers by economists James N. Morgan and James D. Smith that was published in the May 1, 1970 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." The author states that the two papers presented by Morgan and Smith reflect changing times. According to the author, income distribution and especially the distribution at the low end are back in the spotlight as an issue of social policy and appropriately it is eliciting scientific attention. Early in the 1960's, concern with sharing the national economic pie was eclipsed by the urgent concern about the lagging growth of the pie. Economists were wise to focus on the aggregative issues in the early 1960's and it is wise to shift focus onto distributive issues as one enters the 1970's. Now that the U.S. has reaped important benefits of economic growth and high employment, other problems deserve emphasis. Both of the present papers make a contribution to that knowledge. They reflect different methodological approaches and stress different issues. They do share one substantive characteristic, pointing to the importance of labor force participation by the wife as a key determinant of family income and income changes.

The article presents titles of new books related economics. Books related to general economics include — "USA and Its Economic Future--A Twentieth Century Survey," by A.B. Barach and R. Mooley, "The Hidden Face of Free Enterprise--The Strange Economics of the American Businessman," by J.R. Bunting, "The Nation's Economic Objectives," edited by E.O. Edwards, "Economic Growth--An American Problem," edited by P.M. Gutmann and "The Economic System" by J.M. Kuhlman and G.S. Skinner. Books on price, income and employment include — "A Macroeconomic Theory of Workable Competition," by C.E.A. Ferguson, "Aggregation in Economic Analysis--An Introductory Survey," by H.A.J. Green, "The Demand for Physical Capital: An Application of a Wealth Model," by F.S. Hammer, "Outline of Price Theory," by A.M. Levenson and B.S. Solon "Economic Thought of Mahatma Gandhi," edited by A.S. Mathur and J.S. Mathur, "Income: Analysis and Policy," by M.H. Rose and Economic Trends and Indications," by B. Kapasi.

The article presents abstracts of research papers related to economics and methodology. The first paper "Economic Policies in a Democracy," by P. Bernholz, attempts to develop some tendencies of economic policy. It deals with a growing economy, which is assumed, to work on a high level of diversification and consumption. Some sectors expand however only slowly others even decline. Given these assumptions, the governmental economic policy will favor: sectors with low rates of growth and sectors with low capital/ employment ratios. The second paper "The Definition of Regional Economics," by V. Dubey, examines several definitions of regional economics, which have appeared in the writings of regional economists, which have appeared in the writings of regional economists and to suggest a suitable alternative. One approach to the question of defining regional economics is to deny the possibility of isolating such a discipline. Another is the precise opposite of this, namely that a group of problems that form the subject matter of regional economics can be distinguished and that a listing of such problems could serve as a definition of the subject.

The majority of papers analyzing the employment effects of unemployment insurance (UI) benefit durations focus on the duration of the first unemployment spell. In this paper, we make two contributions. First, we use a regression discontinuity design to analyze the long-term effects of extensions in UI durations. These estimates differ from standard estimates in that they incorporate differences in UI benefit receipt and employment due to recurrent unemployment spells. Second, we derive a welfare formula of UI extensions that incorporates recurrent nonemployment spells. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using confidential establishment-level data from the US Census Bureau's Longitudinal Business Database, this paper documents how local shocks propagate across US regions through firms' internal networks of establishments. Consistent with a model of optimal within-firm resource allocation, we find that establishment-level employment is sensitive to shocks in distant regions in which the establishment's parent firm is operating, and that the elasticity with respect to such shocks increases with the firm's financial constraint. At the aggregate regional level, we find that aggregate county-level employment is sensitive to shocks in distant counties linked through firms' internal networks. (JEL D22, G32, L14, L22, R23, R32) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the margins along which firms responded to a large and persistent minimum wage increase in Hungary. We show that employment elasticities are negative but small even four years after the reform; that around 75 percent of the minimum wage increase was paid by consumers and 25 percent by firm owners; that firms responded to the minimum wage by substituting labor with capital; and that disemployment effects were greater in industries where passing the wage costs to consumers is more difficult. We estimate a model with monopolistic competition to explain these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lending cuts by banks directly affect the firms borrowing from them, but also indirectly depress economic activity in the regions in which they operate. This paper moves beyond firm-level studies by estimating the effects of an exogenous lending cut by a large German bank on firms and counties. I construct an instrument for regional exposure to the lending cut based on a historic, postwar breakup of the bank. I present evidence that the lending cut affected firms independently of their banking relationships, through lower aggregate demand and agglomeration spillovers in counties exposed to the lending cut. Output and employment remained persistently low even after bank lending had normalized. Innovation and productivity fell, consistent with the persistent effects. (JEL E32, E44, G01, G21, G32, R11, R23) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents comments of different persons on price control and rationing papers written by various economists. According to Paul M. O'Leary, until now price controls, production, and materials controls, wage controls, and rationing have been, in the main, consistent one with another. The War Production Board's control of the demand for industrial materials and the U.S. Office of Price Administration's rationing control of the demand for certain consumer's goods have contributed tremendously to the relative success of price control. According to Elmer B. Staats, he believes that there is agreement that their anti-inflationary controls are highly interdependent and that price and rationing during the period cannot succeed unless the controls are adequately co-ordinated. Secondly, each of the papers emphasizes the practical difficulties which will face the government agencies during the transition period in maintaining necessary controls in the face of the desire to relax government restrictions, inability to retain personnel, and what may appear to be a conflict with a program for full employment by industry.

The article presents information on essay contributions to Pabst Post-war Employment contest, which offered $50,000 in prizes for the best and the most practical solutions to the broad problems of post-war employment in the U.S. Serious contributions by professional students of the subject were solicited. Seventeen winning essays have been published by the Pabst Co. The collection is well worth for the insight provides into the applied economic thinking of a group of able and at least potentially influential economists. There is a striking agreement in fundamental outlook characterizing a large majority of papers. This agreement takes the form of an implicit or explicit interpretation of the problem as primarily the problem of finding adequate offsets to savings at the level of employment desired. The majority of these papers begin with a fundamentally correct understanding of what the employment problem is, and advocate measure that would at least work in the right direction. A large majority of the proposals are extremely sensible, and there are few measures advocated in any of the papers that would not confer real benefits on the U.S. economy.

The article presents some abstracts of published materials concerning income and employment theory. The first paper entitled "Balanced Growth: A Razor's Edge?," by C.A. Akeklof and W.D. Nobbhaus discusses Cobb-Douglas production function. Another abstract entitled "Neoclassical Theory of Technical Progress and Relative Factor Shares," by C.E. FERGUSON contains a summary restatement and interpretation of the neoclassical theory of distribution, relative shares and technical progress. The paper entitled "Inflation, Income Distribution and Capital Accumulation in a Two-Sector Model of Growth," by D.J. Harris brings together some of the structural and behavioral features of the process of capital accumulation. Structural features considered relate to the technical specificity of capital equipment in production of consumer goods and capital goods. The abstract entitled "Toward the Application of Dynamic Growth Theory to Regions," by L.M. Hartman and D. Seckler develops a regional investment model to formulate more precisely the question of whether a region is capable of sustained endogenous growth.

The article presents abstracts of several research papers about price and allocation theory, income and employment theory and the history of economic thought. The first paper "Consumers' Demand, Distributive Shares and Prices," by A. Bose, discusses the consumers' demand patterns. The second paper "Economic Growth in a Two-Sector Planning Model," by S. Bose, analyses the growth process of two-sector planned economy. The two sectors produced homogeneous consumption and capital goods with two smooth production functions which are linear homogeneous in the two factors-labor and capital. The third paper "Optimal Investment Allocation Between Consumer Goods and Capital Goods," by R. Findlay, presents a model of the industrial sector of an under- developed economy which obtains its labor force and food supplies from an agricultural sector where there is disguised unemployment. Another paper "The Determinants of Investment Revisited," by Z. Griliches and N. Wallace, states that the market value of the firm is the principal explainer and predictor of investment.

The article presents some titles of new books on economics. Some books are: The Angel and the Wheat--Communication Theory and Economics," by S. Bagno, A Strategy of Decision--Policy Evaluation As a Social Process," by D. Braybrooke and C.E. Lindhlom; "Are We Slaves of Some Defunct Economist?" by D.M. Keezer; Insuring Full Employment--A United States Policy for Domestic Prosperity and World Development," by J.H.G. Pierson; The Intellectual and the Market Place and Other Essays," by G.J. Stigler; "Prices for Primary Producers," by S. Caine; "Capital Stock Growth: A Micro-Econometric Approach," by S. Kuh; "A Study of Cost and Demand Inflation," by J.D. Pitchford; "Profitability and Size of Firm," by H.O. Stekler; "Land Reforms in West Bengal--A Study on Implementation," by S.K. Basu and S.K. Bhattacharyya; "Output Employment and Productivity Growth in New Zealand Manufacturing Industries," by C.A. Blyth and P. Hamer; "Economic Development: Past and Present," by R.T. Gill; "Planning Economic Development," edited by E.E. Hagen.

This paper studies the judicial, political, and intellectual battles over minimum wages from the early state laws of the 1910s through the peak in the real federal minimum in 1968. Early laws were limited to women and children and were ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court between 1923 and 1937. The first federal law in 1938 initially exempted large portions of the workforce and set rates that became effectively obsolete during World War II. Later amendments raised minimum rates, but coverage did not expand until 1961. The states led the way in rates and coverage in the 1940s and 50s and again since the 1980s. The most contentious questions of today—the impact of minimum wages on earnings and employment—were already being addressed by economists in the 1910s. By about 1960, these discussions had surprisingly modern concerns about causality but did not have modern econometric tools or data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses non-employment margins through which firms may respond to minimum wage increases. Margins of interest include evasion, output prices, noncash compensation, job attributes including effort requirements, the firm's mix of low- and high-skilled labor, and the firm's mix of labor and capital. I discuss the basic theory behind each margin's potential importance as well as findings from empirical research on their real-world relevance. Additionally, I present a set of pedagogical diagrams that show how supply and demand analyses of labor markets can be extended to bring additional nuances of real-world markets into the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses job seekers' elicited beliefs about job finding to disentangle the sources of the decline in job-finding rates by duration of unemployment. We document that beliefs have strong predictive power for job finding, but are not revised downward when remaining unemployed and are subject to optimistic bias, especially for the long-term unemployed. Leveraging the predictive power of beliefs, we find substantial heterogeneity in job finding with the resulting dynamic selection explaining most of the observed negative duration dependence in job finding. Moreover, job seekers' beliefs underreact to heterogeneity in job finding, distorting search behavior and increasing long-term unemployment. (JEL D83, E24, J22, J64, J65) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents evidence that school districts' use of an alternative academic calendar, the year-round school calendar, results in a reduction in maternal employment for women with school-aged children that varies in magnitude across racial groups. Negative employment effects are larger in districts with a particularly high proportion white and smaller in districts with a particularly high proportion of minorities. The larger effects in primarily white school districts is not likely to be explained by income differences, yet could potentially be explained by the lower reliance on relatives for child care among whites than minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks whether the slow recovery of the US economy from the trough of the Great Recession was anticipated, and identifies some of the factors that contributed to surprises in the course of the recovery. We construct a narrative using news reports and government announcements to identify policy and financial shocks. We then compare forecasts and forecast revisions of GDP to the narrative. Successive financial and fiscal shocks emanating from Europe, together with self-inflicted wounds from the political stalemate over the US fiscal situation, help explain the slowing of the pace of an already slow recovery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivated by the evidence that risk premia are large and countercyclical, this paper studies a tractable real business cycle model with a small risk of economic disaster, such as the Great Depression. An increase in disaster risk leads to a decline of employment, output, investment, stock prices, and interest rates, and an increase in the expected return on risky assets. The model matches well data on quantities, asset prices, and particularly the relations between quantities and prices, suggesting that variation in aggregate risk plays a significant role in some business cycles. (JEL E13, E32, E44, G32) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That the employment rate appears to respond to changes in trend growth is an enduring macroeconomic puzzle. This paper shows that, in the presence of a return to experience, a slowdown in productivity growth raises reservation wages, thereby lowering aggregate employment. The paper develops new evidence that shows this mechanism is important for explaining the growth-employment puzzle. The combined effects of changes in aggregate wage growth and returns to experience account for all the increase from 1968 to 2006 in nonemployment among low-skilled men and for approximately half the increase in nonemployment among all men. (JEL E24, J24, J31) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presented is a report by the editor of "The American Economic Review" on the state of the magazine. The article notes that manuscripts of articles are managed in-house by an editor and a staff based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A number of other topics are addressed including editorial and publication statistics, including the number of articles published, the data posting policy of the magazine, and the five co-editors of the magazine at the beginning of 2009 including Vincent Crawford, Mark Gertler and Pinelopi Goldberg.

This paper presents empirical evidence that the growth of export manufacturing in Mexico during a period of major trade reforms (the years 1986 to 2000) altered the distribution of education. I use variation in the timing of factory openings across commuting zones to show that school drop-out increased with local expansions in export- manufacturing industries. The magnitudes I find suggest that for every 25 jobs created, one student dropped out of school at grade 9 rather than continuing through to grade 12. These effects are driven by less- skilled export- manufacturing jobs which raised the opportunity cost of schooling for students at the margin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper links the sharp drop in US manufacturing employment after 2000 to a change in US trade policy that eliminated potential tariff increases on Chinese imports. Industries more exposed to the change experience greater employment loss, increased imports from China, and higher entry by US importers and foreign-owned Chinese exporters. At the plant level, shifts toward less labor-intensive production and exposure to the policy via input-output linkages also contribute to the decline in employment. Results are robust to other potential explanations of employment loss, and there is no similar reaction in the European Union, where policy did not change. (JEL D72, E24, F13, F16, L24, L60, P33) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The employment-to-population ratio among prime-aged adults aged 25-54 has fallen substantially since 2000. The explanations proposed for the decline in the employment-to-population ratio have been of two broad types. One set of explanations emphasizes cyclical factors associated with the recession; the second set of explanations focuses on the role of longer-run structural factors. In this paper, we argue that while the decline in manufacturing and the consequent reduction in demand for less-educated workers put downward pressure on their employment rates in the pre-recession 2000-2006 period, the increased demand for less-educated workers because of the housing boom was simultaneously pushing their employment rates upwards. For a few years, the housing boom served to 'mask' the labor market effects of manufacturing decline for less-educated workers. When the housing market collapsed in 2007, there was a large, immediate decline in employment among these workers, who faced not only the sudden disappearance of jobs related to the housing boom, but also the fact that manufacturing's steady decline during the early 2000s left them with many fewer opportunities in that sector than had existed at the start of the decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information regarding the meeting of the executive committee of the American Economic Association that took place in San Francisco, California, on January 2, 2016. The author comments on the main topics discussed, including Robert J. Gordon's book "The Rise and Fall of American Growth," the status of the Job Openings for Economists (JOE) Network, and the journal "American Economic Review."

This article presents the author's response to the criticisms made against his paper on a dynamic optimal intervention model to solve the problems of factor-market distortions. Edward Ray, in his comment on my 1976 paper, analyzes a slightly different model than the one I presented, and thus reaches different conclusions. His principal conclusions are that given wage rigidities, a wage subsidy to producers is needed, and this subsidy is equivalent to the optimal static subsidy that ensures full employment in each sector; and given the forced equilization of wages across sectors, a subsidy to workers is needed to encourage labor transfers between sectors. Thus, Ray finds that full employment is always desirable, whereas I find that some unemployment is present along the optimum path. The differences in our solutions arise from the different specifications of our models. Ray finds that full employment is always desirable, and that two subsidies are required. His first conclusion differs from my conclusion because he uses a different model; the specification of the control model, and not the presence of distortions, determines whether full employment is optimal. Regarding his second conclusion, we have seen that the policies needed to support the optimal plan depend on the types of distortions present and the way in which the labor market functions.

The article presents information about a research, made to identify the factors influencing labor supply. The most remarkable advances in this field of research has been the introduction of nonlinearity into models and estimating techniques in order to analyze the several effects of taxes. Some questions on which there is little research testimony including the adequacy of conventional measures of labor supply. In the broader class of questions related to earnings test for social security recipients, the choice of retirement age is one element in the broader class of questions. Critiques for the several papers related to economics in the May 1980 issue of 'The American Economic Review' have been presented in the article. Other issues including the increased attention paid to labor supply incentives and labor quality in the context of human capital investment have also been discussed as a third dimension of labor supply in the article.

This paper reports the major findings of a buyer's survey of the 1985-86 academic market for beginning Ph.D. economists based on a stratified random sample of all economics departments ranked in the top 20 (ECON20)[2] and 380 other economics departments (ECONOTHER).[3] Its purpose is to increase the level of information available to buyers and particularly sellers in this market. Sellers in this job market are typically graduate students in the final stages of their doctoral dissertations and represent the latest vintage of economists graduating from the 115 universities that grant a Ph.D. They will find answers to questions like: Will a phone call from a candidate or faculty advisor increase the probability of securing a job interview? How many weeks before the AEA meetings are requests for interviews sent out? How long does a typical job interview last and what criteria are applied? How soon after the meetings interview is a candidate likely to be invited to give a seminar at a school? Are elements of the job offer such as salad, teaching load, and summer research money negotiable? How long does a candidate have to accept or reject an offer?
In an effort to increase the stock of information available to sellers and buyers in the academic job market for beginning Ph.D. economists, this paper has presented the findings of a survey of the 1985-86 hiring process by economics departments. 1. There are three sub-markets operating within the overall job market. The "meetings market" sorts and clears rather quickly: over 90 percent of all job offers in this market are made in January and February. The ECON20 departments are major players in a "preemptive market" that occurs before the "meetings market" begins and is aimed primarily at the very top candidates in the market. In contrast, the ECON20 departments do not participate in a "secondary market" which primarily sorts during and after the clearing of the meetings market. 2. The October and November issues of... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is written on the assumption that, after the reconversion period, U.S. major economic problem will be the attainment of a level of aggregate demand reasonably commensurate with her technical capacity to produce. If, after reconversion, there is no hiatus between aggregate demand and potential supply, or if demand, at the prevailing price structure, actually tends to be in excess of supply, the remarks which follow will be of little relevance to future problems. It will not be the author's purpose in this article to estimate American capacity to produce at optimum employment or to guess how much less than such capacity aggregate demand is likely to be. In recent months, this problem has been tackled by several competent investigators. In principle, any deficiency of monetary demand can be eliminated by a sufficient expansion of government expenditures. In the present paper, the author will consider the possibility of removing such a deficiency through an extensive program of foreign investment.

This section presents abstracts of research papers which were published in the August 1965 issue of "The Review of Economics and Statistics." The object of the computations described in the paper "The Economic Impact--Industrial and Regional--of an Arms Cut" was to determine what effect a hypothetical reduction in military demand accompanied by a compensating increase in non-military demand would have on the industrial composition and regional distribution of employment in the continental U.S. In the paper "Foreign Assistance and Self-Help: A Reappraisal of Development Finance," the relationship between foreign capital inflows and progress toward self-sustained growth in developing countries is studied as the central aspect of the self-help problem. "Investment in Commercial Construction" focuses on the construction of office buildings and retail stores, which together account for 85% of the total. The basic hypothesis underlying the statistical analysis is that because commercial construction is an investment flow, it can best be explained by factors determining the prospective profitability of investment: expected revenue and cost. "Prediction With Consumer Attitudes; The Time Series--Cross Section Paradox" examines the hypothesis that there are attitudinal effects at the individual consumer level but that they have been obscured by inadequate measurement or mis-specification.

This section presents abstracts of studies on economics which were published in the March 1965 issue of The American Economic Review. The paper titled the Economist and the State, by George J. Stigler, focuses on the economic theories and empirical evidence that led classical economists to deny a large economic role to the state. The paper titled The International Short-Term Capital Movements Function, by Jerome L. Stein, focuses on short-term capital movements and the theoretical models of the foreign exchange market. The paper titled Wages and Employment in a Labor-Surplus Economy, examines the behavior of real wages and employment in Puerto Rico from 1945 to 1964. The purpose is to test development models which assume a constant real wage level.

This article presents abstracts of several papers about political economics published in the April 1965 issue of the Journal of Political Economy. In the article Dropouts and the Unemployed, a positive association is found between intercohort differences in the school-attendance rate and in the unemployment rate among cohort members not enrolled in school at ages 16-17 for recent cohorts of teenagers. In the paper The Effects of Farm Price Supports on the Returns to Land and Labor in Agriculture, John E. Floyd considered three price-support programs where output is alternatively not controlled, controlled by acreage restrictions or controlled by restrictions on the quantity of produce that farmers can market.

On March 24, 1959, the U.S., Senate and House directed the Joint Economic Committee to conduct a large-scale investigation into the problems of maximum employment, an adequate rate of economic growth and the maintenance of price stability. On January 10, 1960, less than a year later, the Committee and the staff assembled for the purpose concluded its task, having published a Committee Report. It will be some time before the profession has managed to digest the enormous volume of material. This article is particularly concerned with the two central documents, the Committee and Staff Reports. There is a vast amount of useful analysis in the Staff Report and , the hearings and the study papers. The center topics are difficult and complicated in the extreme. There are marks of haste and insufficient integration throughout the Staff Report, insufficient time is the obvious source of many of its shortcomings. Bluntly put, it was ridiculous to expect that a staff could be assembled, hearings held, study projects assigned, and the whole enormous resultant mass digested, in less than a year. Viewed against the background of this limiting factor, the Staff Report emerges as a remarkably good performance.

The article presents discussions by economists on some papers, related to economics, published in the May 1, 1953 issue of the journal "American Economic Review." The author states that in seeking to analyze wage levels under full employment, there is need to sharpen issues, to develop hypotheses and to test them by experience. According to the author, economist Albert Rees in his paper related to wage levels under full employment, fails to put sufficient stress on certain institutional factors affecting employment and his assumptions with respect to the processes by which wage increases occur in the U.S. under full employment appear to be open to question. Part of Rees's analysis runs in terms of labor demand and supply and whether they are evenly balanced at existing wage rates. He even refers to economist Abba Lerner's proposal to achieve some such balancing, though dismissing it as rather impractical. Not only is it impractical, the proposal itself reveals a remarkable unawareness of the nature of hiring and employment practices in modern industry, such as hiring at the bottom of the occupational ladder, promotion from within the plant, seniority in lay-off and opportunity for promotion and benefits according to length of continuous service with the firm.

An optimal pace of business dynamics-encompassing the processes of entry, exit, expansion, and contraction-would balance the benefits of productivity and economic growth against the costs to firms and workers associated with reallocation of productive resources. It is difficult to prescribe what the optimal pace should be, but evidence accumulating from multiple datasets and methodologies suggests that the rate of business startups and the pace of employment dynamism in the US economy has fallen over recent decades and that this downward trend accelerated after 2000. A critical factor in accounting for the decline in business dynamics is a lower rate of business startups and the related decreasing role of dynamic young businesses in the economy. For example, the share of US employment accounted for by young firms has declined by almost 30 percent over the last 30 years. These trends suggest that incentives for entrepreneurs to start new firms in the United States have diminished over time. We do not identify all the factors underlying these trends in this paper but offer some clues based on the empirical patterns for specific sectors and geographic regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An increasingly influential 'technological-discontinuity' paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using US manufacturing industries. There is some limited support for more rapid productivity growth in IT-intensive industries depending on the exact measures, though not since the late 1990s. Most challenging to this paradigm, and to our expectations, is that output contracts in IT-intensive industries relative to the rest of manufacturing. Productivity increases, when detectable, result from the even faster declines in employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new IV strategy based on IVF (in vitro fertilization) induced fertility variation among childless women to estimate the causal effect of having children on their career. For this purpose, we use administrative data on IVF treated women in Denmark. Because observed chances of IVF success do not depend on labor market histories, IVF treatment success provides a plausible instrument for childbearing. Our IV estimates indicate that fertility effects on earnings are: (i) negative, large, and long-lasting; (ii) driven by fertility effects on hourly earnings and not so much on labor supply; and (iii) much stronger at the extensive margin than at the intensive margin.

We use relatively unexplored dimensions of US microdata to examine how US manufacturing employment has evolved across industries, firms, establishments and regions. These data provide support for both trade- and technology-based explanations of the overall decline of employment over this period, while also highlighting the difficulties of estimating an overall contribution for each mechanism. Toward that end, we discuss how more careful analysis of these trends might yield sharper insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine how business cycles affect labor market outcomes in the United States. We conduct a detailed analysis of how cycles affect outcomes differentially across persons of differing age, education, race, and gender, and we compare the cyclical sensitivity during the Great Recession to that in the early 1980s recession. We present raw tabulations and estimate a state panel data model that leverages variation across U.S. states in the timing and severity of business cycles. We find that the impacts of the Great Recession are not uniform across demographic groups and have been felt most strongly for men, black and Hispanic workers, youth, and low-education workers. These dramatic differences in the cyclicality across demographic groups are remarkably stable across three decades of time and throughout recessionary periods and expansionary periods. For the 2007 recession, these differences are largely explained by differences in exposure to cycles across industry-occupation employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real matching markets are subject to constraints. For example, the Japanese government introduced a new medical matching system in 2009 that imposes a 'regional cap' in each of its 47 prefectures, which regulates the total number of medical residents who can be employed in each region. Based on Kamada and Kojima (2011), this paper studies matching markets with such constraints by examining in great detail the Japanese medical matching market. Specifically, we show that the new system introduced in 2009 has problems in terms of stability and strategy-proofness, and provide an alternative mechanism that does better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]