Unplanned pregnancies halt women’s career progression and result in income losses of 20% five years after an initial contraceptive failure. The detrimental effects of unplanned children are larger for younger women and women enrolled in education. In contrast, planned children have minimal impacts on women’s labor market outcomes.

Lagging US productivity growth since the 1970s, despite the rapid pace of innovation in information and communications technologies (ICT) and electronics, is explained in part from an unbalanced sectoral distribution of innovation; that is, technological advances over the last several decades have been unbalanced across sectors and have created endogenous bottlenecks, holding back aggregate productivity.

Matching U.S. Army officers to units using deferred acceptance reduced attrition in their first year by 16.7%, but this effect faded in the second year. Matching with deferred acceptance had no impact on performance. Communication and coordination of preferences may limit the benefits of deferred acceptance in some matching markets.

Most parents whose children receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits overestimate the likelihood that their child will receive SSI benefits in adulthood; further, reducing parents’ expectations that children will receive benefits in adulthood does not increase investments in children’s human capital.

Incarceration generates short-term drops in economic activity, but has limited long-run impacts. Why? Most defendants’ challenges in the labor market begin long before they first enter prison.

Among low-wage workers, job loss causes a 13% reduction in earnings six years later and over $40,000 cumulative lost earnings, mostly due to reductions in employment and hours. Comparable losses for workers earning $15-$30 per hour are driven by wage reductions.

US cell-phone-based mobility data reveal that central business trips in large cities have stabilized at about 60% of pre-pandemic levels, with smaller cities returning to pre-pandemic levels. For 274 US cities that stabilized at a large fraction of remote work, welfare losses average 2.7%.

The authors present and empirically validate a theory where increases in top income inequality in one occupation can spill over through consumption to other occupations that provide non-divisible services directly to customers.