We investigate the welfare consequences of the stark increase in wage and earnings inequality in the US over the last 30 years. Our data stems from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, which is the only US data set that contains information on wages, hours worked, earnings and consumption for the...

In this paper, we document the importance of high-skilled immigration for U.S. employment in STEM fields. To begin, we review patterns of U.S. employment in STEM occupations among workers with at least a college degree. These patterns mirror the cycle of boom and bust in the U.S. technology...

Congress first imposed an aggregate debt limit in 1939 when it delegated decisions about designing US debt instruments to the Treasury. Before World War I, Congress designed each bond and specified a maximum amount of each bond that the Treasury could issue. It usually specified purposes for...

Even before the Great Recession, U.S. employment growth was unimpressive. Between 2000 and 2007, the economy gave back the considerable gains in employment rates it had achieved during the 1990s, with major contractions in manufacturing employment being a prime contributor to the slump. The U.S....

The U.S. economy has grown faster--and scored higher on many other macroeconomic metrics--when the President of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican. For many measures, including real GDP growth (on which we concentrate), the performance gap is both large and statistically...

An increasingly influential "technological-discontinuity" paradigm suggests that IT-induced technological changes are rapidly raising productivity while making workers redundant. This paper explores the evidence for this view among the IT-using U.S. manufacturing industries. There is some...

This paper explores the geographic overlap of trade and technology shocks across local labor markets in the United States. Regional exposure to technological change, as measured by specialization in routine task-intensive production and clerical occupations, is largely uncorrelated with regional...

We use data from the NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates to examine the post-degree location choices of foreign-born students receiving PhDs from US universities in science and engineering. Over the period 1960 to 2008, 77% of foreign-born S&E PhDs state that they plan to stay in the United States....

We analyze the effect of rising Chinese import competition between 1990 and 2007 on local U.S. labor markets, exploiting cross-market variation in import exposure stemming from initial differences in industry specialization while instrumenting for imports using changes in Chinese imports by...

In this paper we build a model of market competition among religious denominations, using a framework that involves incomplete contracts and the production of club goods. We treat denominations akin to multinational enterprises, which decide which countries to enter based on local market...