We document two new facts about the market-level response to minimum wage hikes: firm exit and entry both rise. These results pose a puzzle: canonical models of firm dynamics predict that exit rises but that entry falls. We develop a model of firm dynamics based on putty-clay technology and show...

The Bartik instrument is formed by interacting local industry shares and national industry growth rates. We show that the typical use of a Bartik instrument assumes a pooled exposure research design, where the shares measure differential exposure to common shocks, and identification is based on...

The Bartik instrument is formed by interacting local industry shares and national industry growth rates. We show that the Bartik instrument is numerically equivalent to using local industry shares as instruments in a GMM estimator and discuss how different asymptotics imply different identifying...

For the unemployment rate to decline, the U.S. economy needs to generate above-trend job growth. We currently estimate trend employment growth to be around 80,000 jobs per month, and we expect it to decline over the remainder of the decade, due largely to changing labor force demographics and...

The authors extend methodologies from their previous research to provide estimates of the long-run trend rate of labor force participation (LFP) based on data before the Great Recession (before 2008). Their models suggest that the actual LFP rate as of the third quarter of 2014 is 0.2 to 1.2...

The authors examine the recent decline in teen work activity, offering explanations for both the long secular decline since the late 1970s and the recent acceleration in this decline since 2000. They argue that much of this pattern is due to a significant increase in the rewards to formal...