Labor income earned in Iceland in 1987 went untaxed. I use this episode to study labor supply responses to temporary wage changes. Using a population-wide dataset of earnings and working time and two identification strategies, I estimate intensive and extensive margin Frisch elasticities of 0.4 and 0.09, respectively. Workers with the ability to adjust drive these average responses: extensive margin by young and close-to-retirement cohorts and intensive margin responses by workers in temporally flexible jobs, though secondary jobs contribute to one-tenth of the response. The results suggest that adjustment frictions may similarly explain differences in elasticities within and across countries.

An emerging consensus is that the Frisch elasticity of labor supply is small. This may reflect a lack of salience, inelastic preferences, or prevalence of frictions. Studying survey data collected during a tax holiday in Norway, when earnings were untaxed during a transition between tax systems, I report three findings. First, 80 percent of adults were aware of the tax holiday. Second, one-fifth of adults responded by working more. Third, frictions in adjusting working hours or non-working time appear to be the reason for a majority of non-responses. The findings support the long-held notion that labor supply choices are constrained.

We exploit a volcanic “experiment” to study the costs and benefits of geographic mobility. In our experiment, a third of the houses in a town were covered by lava. People living in these houses were much more likely to move away permanently. For the dependents in a household (children), our estimates suggest that being induced to move by the “lava shock” dramatically raised lifetime earnings and education. While large, these estimates come with a substantial amount of statistical uncertainty. The benefits of moving were very unequally distributed across generations: the household heads (parents) were made slightly worse off by the shock. These results suggest large barriers to moving for the children, which imply that labor does not flow to locations where it earns the highest returns. The large gains from moving for the young are surprising in light of the fact that the town affected by our volcanic experiment was (and is) a relatively high income town. We interpret our findings as evidence of the importance of comparative advantage: the gains to moving may be very large for those badly matched to the location they happened to be born in, even if differences in average income are small.

We examine the effect of monetary policy on household spending when households are indebted and interest rates on outstanding loans are linked to short-term interest rates. Using administrative data on balance sheets and consumption expenditure of Swedish households, we reveal the cash-flow transmission channel of monetary policy. On average, indebted households reduce consumption spending by an additional 0.23–0.55 percentage points in response to a one-percentage-point increase in the policy rate, relative to a household with no debt. We show that these responses are driven by households that have some or a large share of their debt in contracts where interest rates vary with short-term interest rates, such as adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs), which implies that monetary policy shocks are quickly passed through to interest expenses.

Administrative data on monthly wages in Iceland during 1998–2010 provide new insight into nominal wage rigidity. Unlike the data used in previous work, ours have a higher frequency, minimal measurement error, and a long sample including a period of substantial macroeconomic instability. We find that the monthly frequency of nominal wage changes is 13 percent. Although nominal wage cuts are rare, their frequency rises following a large macroeconomic shock. Timing of wage changes is both time-dependent and state-dependent: we find evidence of synchronization of adjustment and contracts of fixed duration, but also that inflation and unemployment over the wage spell affect the timing of adjustment.

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