JEEA / EER Digest JEEA / EER 文献速递

Tutoring programs for low-performing students, delivered in-person or online, effectively enhance school performance, yet their medium- and longer-term impacts on labor market outcomes remain less understood. To address this gap, we conduct a randomized controlled trial with 839 secondary school students in Germany to examine the effects of an online tutoring program for low-performing students on academic performance and school-to-work transitions. The online tutoring program had a non-significant intention-to-treat effect of 0.06 standard deviations on math grades six months after program start. However, among students who had not received other tutoring services prior to the intervention, the program significantly improved math grades by 0.14 standard deviations. Moreover, students in non-academic school tracks experienced smoother school-to-work transitions, with vocational training take-up 18 months later being 5 percentage points higher—an effect that was even larger (12 percentage points) among those without prior tutoring. Overall, the results indicate that tutoring can generate lasting benefits for low-performing students that extend beyond school performance.

This paper studies the short-run economic impact of unanticipated disruptions to inputs potentially critical for domestic production and the green transition, and prone to geopolitical weaponisation (Foreign Critical Inputs - FCIs). Using firm-level customs and balance-sheet data for Belgium, France, Italy, Slovenia, and Spain, we find that a 50% reduction in FCI imports from China-aligned countries could lead to an average decline in manufacturing value added of 2.7% across the five countries. The impact, however, is highly uneven across firms, sectors, and regions. These findings highlight that supply disruptions in FCIs can impose substantial short-run economic costs.

This paper studies occupational mobility over the business cycle. We divide occupations into two broad groups, "attractive" and "nonattractive," where we label an occupation attractive if the total net inflow into this occupation through job-to-job transition is positive or its median annual wage is above the median of the population. We measure total net inflows into both occupation groups. We measure these inflows separately for job-to-job (EE) transitions and transitions from unemployment to employment (UE). We find net inflow from nonattractive to attractive occupations through EE transitions slows during recessions. The relative net inflow through UE transitions has a similar cyclicality. This finding suggests a novel cost of recession: during recessions, workers have fewer opportunities to move to a better occupation.

This study investigates recruitment bias in the academic job market. We examine the link between statistical significance and placement outcomes for 200 empirical job market papers from 2018-2021. Marginally significant results are associated with higher academic placement likelihoods, suggesting a preference for statistical significance. This bias may incentivize questionable research practices. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified these dynamics, with marginal significance gaining greater weight in hiring decisions during competitive periods. Evidence of publication bias indicates recruiters may use statistical significance to predict future publications, shaping hiring decisions. These findings highlight systemic challenges to research integrity in economics.

This paper examines how robotization in developed countries impacts workers' earnings and labor dynamics in developing countries. Using nearly a decade of Colombian Social Security records and US robot adoption data, we provide robust evidence that workers in industries highly exposed to US robots experience lower cumulative earnings overall and lower employment for older workers and those employed in larger firms. Workers switching firms within the same industry avoid earnings losses, while those moving across industries face the largest losses, consistent with loss of industry-specific human capital. These effects are driven by reduced Colombian exports to the US, particularly in the primary sector, and are more pronounced among older, high-earning workers and those in larger firms, plausibly more integrated into global value chains and, therefore, more directly exposed to foreign automation.

We model a reinsurance mechanism for the national unemployment insurance programs of euro area member states. The risk-sharing scheme we analyze is designed to smooth country-level unemployment risk and expenditures around each country's median level, so that participation and contributions remain.

We study the causal effect of general education on returns to wealth (k-returns) using a school reform that increased the length of compulsory schooling in Norway in the 1960s. OLS estimates reveal a strong, positive, and statistically significant correlation between education and returns to individual net worth. This effect disappears in IV regressions, implying that general education has no discernible causal effect on individual performance in capital markets, whose heterogeneity largely reflects individual ability and risk tolerance. In contrast, we find that education causes higher returns in the labor market (l-returns). We consider a number of potential explanations for this important asymmetry.

Individual Placement and Support (IPS) is a vocational rehabilitation intervention with strong evidence of effectiveness at increasing employment among those with severe mental illness in secondary care. This paper assesses its effectiveness for individuals with mild-moderate mental or physical health problems in primary or community care settings. We present the results of three large randomised trials delivered across two sites in England. For those in work when randomised, IPS increased employment 12 months later by 3 percentage points and increased health and well-being by 0.10 and 0.18 standard deviations, respectively. For individuals not working when randomised, employment impacts (4 percentage points) were found in one site and health and well-being impacts (0.10 and 0.12 standard deviations, respectively) in another. The results suggest IPS can work for a broader population than those with severe mental health problems but that its effectiveness may vary according to the nature of implementation and the local context. Projected three-year benefits comfortably exceeded costs where there was a health impact. A positive longer-term return is possible without a health impact but would require employment and earnings impacts to be sustained.

This paper develops a micro-founded framework linking price-cost and wage markups to intangible assets. Intangible assets, once created, are a source of firm rents. Owing to limits to enforceable ownership and the non-rival nature of knowledge, these rents can be both retained by the origin firm and transferred to a competitor through poaching of workers. Search and matching frictions affect labor mobility and result in bargaining over rents between the firm and the worker. This environment generates hold-up in intangible asset creation and motivates rent sharing. Under non-compete agreements, poached workers face start delays that weaken outside options. Using microdata from the Netherlands, we document higher price-cost and wage markups in more intangible-intensive firms and lower wages for workers with non-compete agreements, consistent with the model.

We investigate the effect of fear on public demand for state intervention. Our identification strategy leverages a unique quasi-experiment in Russia, where an episode of a popular health-related TV show aired misinformation on virus-fatality risks during our survey on pandemic behavior. Isolating the exogenous variation in fear of infection with a shift-share instrument based on the unanticipated timing of this episode and pre-Covid spatial variation in the show's popularity, we find that fear substantially increases demand for regulation, governmental healthcare spending, and unemployment support while leaving policies unrelated to Covid, like censorship or housing, unaffected. Mechanism analysis reveals that fear enhances perceptions of others' noncompliance, consistent with theories of regulation that highlight free-riding concerns.

In an experimental idea-generation context, we study the effects of input incentives, which reward the time invested in generating ideas, and output incentives, which reward the number of innovative ideas generated. We find that input incentives increase the time spent generating ideas. Output incentives increase both the time spent and the number of ideas generated per unit of time. Overall, we find that compared to a fixed wage, both input and output incentives increase the average number of innovative ideas generated by individual ideators to a similar extent. However, the effort patterns induced by different incentive schemes appear to be associated with distinct processes of idea generation and characteristics of the resulting ideas. Specifically, input incentives seem to slow down the generation of innovative ideas and output incentives are associated with the generation of less complex ideas.