Nathan Lazarus

I am a graduate student in economics at the Massachusetts Institutute of Technology. Previously, I worked for Simon Jäger as a research assistant at the Institute for Labor Economics (IZA) and as a research assistant for Mordecai Kurz and Kenneth Judd at Stanford University.

Here’s a link to my CV.

Publications

How Substitutable Are Workers? Evidence from Worker Deaths

Abstract (click to expand)

We estimate how exogenous worker exits affect firms’ demand for incumbent workers and new hires. Drawing on administrative data from Germany, we analyze 34,000 unexpected worker deaths, which, on average, raise the remaining workers’ wages and retention probabilities. The average effect masks substantial heterogeneity as positive wage effects are concentrated among coworkers in the same occupation as the deceased. We quantify the deviation from a frictionless benchmark model and structurally estimate the size of replacement costs implied by the reduced-form evidence. Our estimates imply large costs of replacing incumbent workers and thus point to substantial frictions in the labor market, especially in thin markets for skill.

Simon Jäger, Jörg Heining, Nathan Lazarus

January 2026 Conditionally Accepted, American Economic Review

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Schooling and Labor Market Consequences of School Construction in Indonesia: Response to a Comment

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We reply to the comments of Roodman (2026) regarding the data and econometric specifications of Duflo (2001). We replicate Roodman’s results and agree with his comments about the errors in the coding of variables. We run additional specifications that seek to correct for the age-differentiated wage dilation issue he describes in the original 1995 data, finding mixed results. We further add data from the 2011-12 SUSENAS survey and find that the treatment effects on long-run wages become substantially larger, in line with the results of Hsiao (2021). We also discuss additional weak instrument corrections.

Esther Duflo, Allan Hsiao, Mikey Jarell, Nathan Lazarus

January 2026 Journal of Comments and Replications in Economics

PDF GitHub

Work in Progress

The Impacts of Predictive Scheduling Laws

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We study the consequences of predictive scheduling laws for wages, emmployment, hours, and the variability of hours worked. A number of states and municipalities have recently passed these laws, which require employers to give their employees advance notice before of their schedules. We are interested in both the first stage, whether these laws succeed in making worker schedules more predictable, as well as the downstream consequences for wages, total employment and hours. We use data from US cell phone pings to quantify the volatility of schedules, and complement and validate this using time clock data from a payroll services provider. We document novel descriptives about the volatility of worker schedules and find small positive impacts of these laws on volatility.

Nathan Lazarus, Whitney Zhang

Taxation and Labor Saving Technology

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We study how changes in relative labor-to-capital taxation affect the direction of technological change, particularly the adoption and innovation of labor-saving versus labor-augmenting technologies. To study these effects, we draw on a stacked difference-in-differences design and variation in the effective relative tax rate across U.S. states. We link these changes to (i) patent classifications into labor-augmenting and labor-saving technologies to study innovation outcomes and (ii) classified microdata from the Longitudinal Foreign Trade Transactions Database to study technology adoption. Our preliminary results so far show limited reduced form effects of increases in relative taxation on the share of labor augmeting patents. We are moving the analysis to the firm level using census data, estimating the adoption of automating technology and using time-varying production function estimation to estimate the effect of taxation on the exponent on labor in the production function.

Daron Acemoglu, Nathan Lazarus, Chantal Pezold

Efficient Layoff Prioritization

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We examine the welfare consequences of requiring firms to prioritize workers with low displacement costs for layoffs. Using linked employer–employee administrative data, we exploit a reform that raised the firm-size threshold for the applicability of German layoff-prioritization rules in a difference-in-differences design. Firms newly exempt from the rules shift layoffs toward older, longer-tenured workers and parents, indicating that the law previously constrained their layoff decisions along these dimensions. These displaced and newly unprotected workers experience larger earnings losses, spend more time unemployed, and draw more on unemployment insurance benefits. At the same time, newly exempt firms recover faster from shocks, with quicker rebounds in profits and employment. To evaluate welfare consequences implied by these patterns, we develop a search-and-matching model with worker heterogeneity in productivity and job-finding rates and introduce dismissal rules that require firms to dismiss high job-finding-rate workers before any low job-finding-rate workers. The model shows that prioritization can raise welfare by reallocating displacement toward workers with shorter expected nonemployment spells, but can also directly reduce output and create dynamic distortions in hiring. Moving forward, we plan to combine the model with our empirical estimates to characterize when layoff-prioritization rules increase social welfare.

Nathan Lazarus, Chantal Pezold

Wage and Retention Effects of Employee Stock Ownership Programs

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We study employee stock ownership programs (ESOPs), which 10.9 million US workers have access to, providing them equity in their employer. In event studies in US administrative data (the LEHD), we are examining the impacts of the introduction of these programs on wages and retention. We also plan to look at how they affect retirement timing and firm productivity.

Alexander Busch, Fiona Chen, Nathan Lazarus

Effects of Exposure to Science on the Direction of Technology: Evidence from British Patents

Matthew Lee Chen, Nathan Lazarus

The Labor Market Consequences of Moving Home (approved U.S. Census Project)

Nathan Lazarus, Ishaana Talesaara, Arthur Wickard