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The "shutdown" economy of April 2020 is compared to a normally functioning economy both in terms of market and nonmarket activities. Three novel methods and data indicate that a full shutdown of "nonessential" activities puts market production about 25 % below normal in the short run. At an annual rate, a full shutdown costs $9 trillion, or about $18,000 per household per quarter. Employment already fell 24 million by early April 2020. These costs indicate, among other things, the value of innovation in both health and general business sectors that can accelerate the time when, and the degree to which, normal activity resumes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) imposes several types of incentives that will affect work schedules. This paper uses tax measurement methods, policy simulation methods, and sensitivity analysis. The tax measurement methods show that historically large new incentives include (1) an explicit penalty on employers who do not offer coverage to their full-time employees; (2) an implicit tax on full-time employment, stemming from the fact that full-time employees at employers that offer affordable coverage are ineligible to receive subsidies on the law's new health insurance exchanges; and (3) an implicit tax on earnings, stemming from the provisions of the law that give lower subsidies to those with higher incomes. Simulation methods and sensitivity analysis suggest that the labor market will likely adjust to the various new costs by reducing weekly employment per person by about 3% compared to what they would have been without the law. The tax incentives will push some workers to work more hours per week (for the weeks that they are on a payroll), and others to work fewer. According to the model presented in this paper, the ACA's incentives and ultimately its behavioral effects will vary substantially across groups, with the elderly experiencing hardly any new incentives and female workers being most likely to cut their work schedules to 29 hours per week. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A popular and long-standing view is that social security is a means for young, unemployed people to "purchase" jobs from older workers. Can social security, by encouraging retirement and hence creating job vacancies for the young, improve the allocation of workers to jobs? Maybe, according to a standard model of labor market search, but public retirement programs currently pay the elderly substantially more than their jobs are worth. An important effect is that retirement reduces the value of other vacant jobs. Our results imply that recent reforms aimed at reducing retirement incentives are likely to improve labor market efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that changes in workers' budget sets cannot explain the dramatic increases in civilian work in the United States during World War II. Although money wages grew during the period, wartime after-tax real wages were lower than either before or after the war. Evidence from the 1940s also appears to be inconsistent with other pecuniary explanations such as wealth effects of government policies, intertemporal substitution induced by asset prices, unfulfilled expectations, and changes in the nonmarket price of time. Although untested and relatively undeveloped, nonpecuniary models of behavior are tempting explanations for wartime work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]