Indivisible Labor

Rogerson (JME, 1988) Individisible Labor, Lotteries and Equilibrium

This paper explores an economy where labor is indivisible (0 or 1). This assumption introduces a non-convexity into the labor supply decision, which significantly enlarged aggregate fluctuations. Under this setting, optimal allocations involve lotteries—instead of allowing workers to choose fractional labor supply, the economy randomizes employment across individuals (some workers are employed, while others are not) in a way that preserves efficiency.

Gender Difference

Lundberg & Stearns (JEP, 2019) Women in Economics: Stalled Progress

This paper reveals the fact that female representation in the economic academia has increased slowly since 1980s. However, share of female PhD recipients has risen, the more recent female cohorts are no different in terms of their broad research interests. Also, differential trends in field choice over time cannot explain the observed changes in the gender gap in the share of PhD recipients who become assistant professors and who are later tenured. The paper attributes the underrepresentedness to disparate assessment of men and women. It appears that women are held to higher standards than men of equal ability, and need to publish more, higher-quality work to achieve equal levels of success in this profession.

Labor and Health

Aizawa & Fang (JPE, 2020) Equilibrium Labor Market Search and Health Insurance Reform

This paper builds a GE model with worker matched with firms (provides jobs with health insurance packages) to investigates the impacts of ACA. Value function iteration is applied to derive the equilibrium and GMM is applied to estimate the structural model coefficients. The paper finds that the implementation of the full version of the ACA would significantly reduce the uninsured rate from about 21.3% in the pre-ACA benchmark economy to 6.6% under the ACA, due to adverse selection effects. Also, ACA would have achieved significant reduction in uninsured rate if individual mandate component were removed, and employer mandate lacks significant differences either kept or removed.