About

Eliza Forsythe is an Associate Professor at the School of Labor and Employment Relations. She holds a PhD in Economics from MIT, obtained in 2014, and a BA in Economics and Mathematics from Mills College in 2008. Her research focuses on labor economics, personnel economics, and macroeconomics, with particular attention to firm management of human resources during economic downturns, the macroeconomic effects of firms’ human resource management decisions, and firm hiring behavior. Prior to her current position, she was a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research from 2014 to 2015. For more information on her research and publications, she maintains a personal website.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Virology
• Political Science
• Economics
• Business
• Economic growth
• Crystallography
• Labour economics
• Engineering
• Law
• Chemistry
• Internal medicine
• Demographic economics

Selected publications

• Why don’t eligible workers receive unemployment insurance?

  Applied Economics Letters · 2026-01-16

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Recruiting Intensity, Hires and Vacancies: Evidence from Firm-Level Data

  The Economic Journal · 2025-01-09

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract We investigate employer recruiting behaviour, using detailed firm-level data from a national survey of employers hiring recent college graduates. We find that this behaviour is responsive to the business cycle, beliefs about labour market tightness and the intended number of hires. Specifically, employers adjust planned recruiting effort and compensation. We then show that, when firms expend greater recruiting effort, they ultimately hire more individuals per vacancy. These results suggest that, when firms want to increase hires, they adjust both the quantity of vacancies and the recruiting intensity per vacancy. If this is true more broadly in the labour market, it may help explain the breakdown in the standard matching function during the Great Recession.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Computerization of Office Jobs

  Journal of Labor Economics · 2025-10-17

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Occupational Job Ladders within and between Firms

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Distributional impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic and the CARES Act

  The Journal of Economic Inequality · 2023-04-24 · 17 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Effect of Minimum Wage Policies on the Wage and Occupational Structure of Establishments

  Journal of Labor Economics · 2023-07-17 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Using establishment-level panel data from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program, I estimate the effect of minimum wage increases implemented by 10 states in 2014 and 2015. I show that minimum wage increases lead to wage spillovers within establishments. I find little evidence that minimum wage increases induce establishments to reorganize their occupational mix. Finally, I find that minimum wage increases propagate up the management hierarchy, leading to increased wages for supervisors. Nonetheless, I find that overall wage inequality decreases within establishments after minimum wage increases.

  PublisherDOI

• Unemployment Insurance Recipiency During the Covid-19 Pandemic

  National Tax Journal · 2023-05-30 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  I estimate the share of eligible individuals who received unemployment insurance (UI) benefits during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. I use individual data on reported recipiency from the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS-ASEC) survey to validate a UI eligibility algorithm that I then apply to the monthly CPS data. Combined with administrative data on actual payments and adjustments for fraud, I estimate that 88 percent of eligible individuals received UI benefits. When I calculate recipiency by program, I find 98 percent of individuals who were eligible for standard UI received benefits, whereas only 76 percent of individuals who were eligible for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance received benefits.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication Data for: Unemployment Insurance Recipiency During the Covid-19 Pandemic

  Harvard Dataverse · 2023-05-07

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This archive provides the code and data to replicate the analysis in "Unemployment Insurance Recipiency During the Covid-19 Pandemic" published in the National Tax Journal in 2023.

  PublisherDOI

• Computerization of White Collar Jobs

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Youth Hiring and Labor Market Tightness

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2022-05-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  It is well-known that recessions can lead to long-term scarring for young workers. I show that employers hire fewer young workers when there are few job openings per unemployed job seeker, while hiring rates for workers with more than 10 years of potential experience are much less cyclically volatile. During the COVID-19 pandemic, youth employment rates rebounded particularly quickly compared with other groups and historic patterns. I show this is consistent with the historic relationship between tightness and youth hiring rates, suggesting youth scarring from the COVID-19 pandemic may be less severe compared with previous recessions.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Guido Matías Cortés

  16 shared

• Lisa Kahn

  University of Rochester

  5 shared

• Fabian Lange

  5 shared

• David Wiczer

  5 shared

• Russell Weinstein

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  3 shared

• Marcus Dillender

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  2 shared

• Jhih-Chian Wu

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Distinguished Alumni Award
• First Decade Achievement
• Special Honorees