Why is workplace sexual harassment chronically underreported? We hypothesize that employers coerce victims into silence through the threat of a retaliatory firing, and test this theory by estimating whether external shocks that reduce the value of a worker's outside options exacerbate underreporting. Under mild assumptions, a rise in the severity of formal complaints is indicative of increased underreporting. Combining this insight with an objective measure of the quality of charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), we perform two analyses. First, we assess whether workers report sexual harassment more selectively during recessions, when outside labor market options are limited. We estimate the fraction of sexual harassment charges deemed to have merit by the EEOC increases by 0.5-0.7% for each one percentage point increase in a state-industry's monthly unemployment rate. The effect is amplified in industries employing a larger fraction of men and in establishments with a higher share of male managers. Second, we test whether less generous UI benefits create economic incentives for victims of workplace sexual harassment to remain silent. We find the selectivity of sexual harassment charges increases by more than 30% in response to a 50% cut to North Carolina's Unemployment Insurance (UI) program following the Great Recession.

We test whether age discrimination rises during recessions using two complementary analyses. Confidential EEOC microdata reveal that age-related firing and hiring charges rise by 3.3 percent and 1.6 percent, respectively, for each percentage point increase in a state-industry's monthly unemployment. Though the opportunity cost of filing falls, the fraction of meritorious claims increases-a suf-ficient condition for rising discrimination under plausible assump-tions. Second, we repurpose data from hiring correspondence studies conducted across different cities and time periods during the recovery from the Great Recession. Each percentage point increase in local unemployment reduces the callback rate for older versus younger women by 15 percent. (JEL E32, J14, J16, J23, J71, M51)

We study the labor market effects of permanent 23-50% reductions in unemployment insurance benefits available in seven states. Leveraging linked firm-establishment data, we find that establishments based in reform states experience 1.5-2.4% faster employment growth relative to the same firm's establishments in other states. Using a similar multi-state firm design, starting salaries are 1.8-7.2% lower in reform states and posted salaries for the same job fall by 1.4-5.5%. These labor supply shocks yield an average labor demand elasticity of -1.0. Our results reveal a substantial decline in match quality and worker bargaining power as UI benefits become less generous.

The 2010 Patient Protection & Affordable Care Act (ACA) significantly expanded access to private and public health insurance for low-income individuals through income-based subsidies and income-based eligibility expansions, respectively. In this paper, we use the universe of hospitals from 2009 to 2015 to characterize how these expansions affected the financing of hospital visits, along with price, utilization, and potential spillovers in the quality of care. The insurance coverage expansions generated a shift in the composition of payers and a modest increase in the utilization of hospital outpatient services. While concerns have been raised that these shifts in utilization could cause negative spillovers to the already insured population (e.g., Medicare enrollees), we find no significant change in the quality of care experienced by those already insured. The primary result of both federally funded insurance expansions was to increase the profits generated and prices charged by the hospitals providing such services.

Conventional wisdom suggests that labor unions raise worker wages, while the newer empirical literature finds only negligible earnings effects. I reconcile this apparent contradiction by arguing that collective bargaining targets fringe benefits. Using U.S. firm-level data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) Multinational Enterprise Survey and Compustat, I exploit a regression discontinuity in majority rule union elections to compare changes in employee compensation at firms whose establishment barely won a union election against those that barely lost an election. Following unionization, average employee compensation and employer pension contributions increase, which raises the labor share of compensation.

We test whether age discrimination rises during recessions using two complemen-tary analyses. EEOC microdata reveal that age-related ring and hiring charges rise by 3.4% and 1.4%, respectively, for each percentage point increase in a state-industry’s monthly unemployment. Though the opportunity cost of ling falls, the fraction of meritorious claims increases—a sufficient condition for rising discrimination under mild assumptions. Second, we repurpose data from a hiring correspondence study conducted across different cities and time periods during the recovery from the Great Recession. Each percentage point increase in local unemployment reduces the callback rate for older versus younger women by 15%. Gordon B. Dahl Department of Economics University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive #0508 La Jolla, CA 92093-0508 and NBER gdahl@ucsd.edu Matthew M. Knepper Terry College of Business University of Georgia Athens, GA 30602 mknepper@uga.edu

The number of workplace sex discrimination charges filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission approaches 25,000 annually. Do the subsequent judicial proceedings suffer from a discriminatory gender bias? Exploiting random assignment of federal district court judges to civil cases, I find that female plaintiffs filing workplace sex discrimination claims are substantially more likely to settle and win compensation whenever a female judge is assigned to the case. Additionally, female judges are 15 percentage points less likely than male judges to grant motions filed by defendants, which suggests that final negotiations are shaped by the emergence of the bias.

STUDY OBJECTIVE:To evaluate whether the availability of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) reduces throughput time and utilization of advanced imaging for patients in an academic ED.DATA SOURCES:All patients arriving at an academic Emergency Department (ED) via ambulance between June 1, 2011, and June 4, 2012, were included in the study. This accounted for 9,970 unique ambulance patient visits.STUDY DESIGN:Retrospective noninterventional analysis of patients in an academic ED. The primary independent variable was whether the patient had a prior EHR at the study hospital. Main outcomes were throughput time, number of advanced diagnostic imaging studies (CT, MRI, ultrasound), and the associated cost of these imaging studies. A set of controls, including age, gender, ICD9 codes, acuity measures, and NYU ED algorithm case severity classifications, was used in an ordinary least-squares (OLS) regression framework to estimate the association between EHR availability and the outcome measures.PRINCIPAL FINDINGS:A patient with a prior EHR experienced a mean reduction in CT scans of 13.9 percent ([4.9, 23.0]). There was no material change in throughput time for patients with a prior EHR and no difference in utilization of other imaging studies across patients with a prior EHR and those without. Cost savings associated with prior EHRs are $22.52 per patient visit.CONCLUSION:EHR availability for ED patients is associated with a reduction in CT scans and cost savings but had no impact on throughput time or order frequency of other imaging studies.