Governments perform national, labor-intensive censuses on a regular schedule. Censuses represent many of the largest peacetime expansions and contractions in federal hiring. The predetermined occurrence and scale of the census offers an economic experiment in the effects of temporary government...

Would countercyclical fiscal policy during recessions improve or worsen the gender employment gap? We answer this question by exploring the state-dependent impact of fiscal spending shocks on employment by gender in the G-7 countries. Using the local projection method, we find that, during...