OECD labor markets have become more "polarized" with employment in the middle of the skill distribution falling relative to the top and (in recent years) also the bottom of the skill distribution. We test the hypothesis of Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003) that this is partly due to information...

Since the 1990s, R&D has become less geographically concentrated, and has seen especially fast growth in emerging markets. One of the distinguishing features of the R&D globalization phenomenon is its concentration within the software/IT domain; the increase in foreign R&D has been largely...

Though online technology has generated excitement about its potential to increase access to education, most research has focused on comparing student performance across online and in-person formats. We provide the first evidence that online education affects the number of people pursuing...

The rising importance of Information Technology (IT) occupations in the U.S. economy has been accompanied by an expansion in the representation of high-skill foreign-born IT workers. To illustrate, the share of foreign born in IT occupations increased from about 15.5% to about 31.5% between 1993...

Amidst the rise of remote work, we ask: what are the effects of proximity to coworkers? We find being near coworkers has tradeoffs: proximity increases long-run human capital development at the expense of short-term output. We study software engineers at a Fortune 500 firm, whose main campus has...

This chapter assesses how models with search frictions have shaped our understanding of aggregate labor market outcomes in two contexts: business cycle fluctuations and long-run (trend) changes. We first consolidate data on aggregate labor market outcomes for a large set of OECD countries. We...

Recent findings have revived interest in the link between real wage rigidity and employment fluctuations, in the context of frictional labor markets. The standard search and matching model fails to generate substantial labor market fluctuations if wages are set by Nash bargaining, while it can...

The debate over the influence of labour market flexibility on performance is unlikely to be settled by additional studies using aggregate data and making cross-country comparisons. While this approach holds little promise, micro-analysis of workers and firms and increased use of experimental...

Large-scale social experiments were pioneered in labor economics, and are the basis for much of what we know about topics ranging from the effect of job training to incentives for job search to labor supply responses to taxation. Random assignment has provided a powerful solution to selection...