We address three core questions about the hypothesized role of newly emerging job categories ('new work') in counterbalancing the erosive effect of task-displacing automation on labor demand: what is the substantive content of new work; where does it come from; and what effect does it have on...

Many observers have forecast large partisan shifts in the US electorate based on demographic trends. Such forecasts are appealing because demographic trends are often predictable even over long horizons. We backtest demographic forecasts using data on US elections since 1952. We envision a...

At the onset of COVID-19, U.S. labor-force participation dropped by about 3 percentage points and remained below pre-pandemic levels three years later. Recovery varied across states, with slower rebounds in those more affected by the pre-pandemic opioid crisis, as measured by age-adjusted opioid...

In 1990, one in five U.S. workers were aged over 50 years whereas today it is one in three. One possible explanation for this is that occupations have become more accommodating to the preferences of older workers. We explore this by constructing an "age-friendliness" index for occupations. We...

From April 2020 through at least the end of 2021, Americans died from non-Covid causes at an average annual rate 97,000 in excess of previous trends. Hypertension and heart disease deaths combined were elevated 32,000. Diabetes or obesity, drug-induced causes, and alcohol-induced causes were...

We examine patterns of work in the U.S. from 1973-2018 with the novel focus on days per week, using intermittent CPS samples and one ATUS sample. Among full-time workers the incidence of four-day work tripled during this period, with over 8 million more full-time workers on four-day weeks. The...

We develop a dynamic microsimulation model to project the labor force and economic dependency ratios in the United States from 2022 to 2060, taking population projections and the large inequalities between population groups of different race/ethnicity and gender into account. We contrast policy...

This paper studies the interaction between the decrease in the gender pay gap and the stagnation in the careers of younger workers, analyzing data from the United States, Italy, Canada, and the United Kingdom. We propose a model of the labor market in which a larger supply of older workers can...

We revisit the cyclical nature of birth rates and infant health and investigate to what extent the relationship between aggregate labor market conditions and birth outcomes is mitigated by the consumption smoothing income assistance delivered through unemployment insurance (UI). We introduce a...