Separations, Sorting and Cyclical Unemployment Job Market Paper

Does the pool of unemployed sort towards low or high ability workers in recessions? I provide evidence with data from the Current Population Survey 1979-2008 that the composition of the pool of unemployed workers shifts towards those with high wages on their previous job. Moreover, I document that these cyclical changes in the composition of the unemployed are mainly due to the higher cyclicality of separations for high wage workers, and not driven by di¤erences in the cyclicality of job …nding rates. A searchmatching model with endogenous separations and worker heterogeneity in terms of ability has di ¢ culty explaining these patterns, whereas an extension of the model with credit shocks does much better in accounting for these new facts. The reason is that, at the productivity threshold at which separations occur, matches with high ability workers produce more negative cash ‡ows and thus separations of these workers are more sensitive to a tightening in the availability of credit

The effect of compulsory schooling expansion on mothers’ attitudes towards domestic violence in Turkey

An extensive literature examines the intergenerational spillover effects of education, but evidence on the causal effects of children’s education on their parents’ outcomes is scant. We estimate the spillover effects of children’s schooling on their mothers’ attitudes towards domestic violence in Turkey. To identify the causal effect of children’s schooling, we exploit a reform that took place in Turkey in 1997 and expanded compulsory schooling from five to eight years. Using a regression discontinuity design based on monthly birth cohorts and data from the 2008 and 2013 waves of Turkey Demographic and Health Surveys, we show that mothers whose eldest daughters were exposed to higher compulsory schooling are by 12 percentage points less likely to find domestic violence justifiable, which represents a decrease by 40%. We find no similar effect of boys’ schooling. Our findings demonstrate that children’s schooling can have impacts on their parents’ attitudes, and such effects are likely to vary by gender of the child

Industrial espionage and productivity

In this paper, we investigate the economic returns to industrial espionage. We show that the flow of information provided by East German informants in the West over the period 1970–1989 led to a significant narrowing of sectoral TFP gaps between West and East Germany. These economic returns were primarily driven by relatively few high-quality pieces of information and particularly large in sectors closer to the West German technological frontier. Our findings suggest that the East-to-West German TFP ratio would have been 13.3 percent lower at the end of the Cold War had East Germany not engaged in industrial espionage in the West