When an employee expects repeated evaluation and performance incentives over time, the potential future rewards create an incentive to invest in building relevant skills. Because new skills benefit job performance, the effects of an evaluation program can persist after the rewards end or even...

This paper estimates causal intergenerational occupation transmission in the military using discontinuities in parents' eligibility for service from the Armed Forces Qualification Test. A parent's enlistment in the Army increases their children's military service propensity by between 58% and...

Actual and perceived gender norms are key to understanding gender inequality in society. In this paper, using newly collected nationally representative datasets from 60 countries that cover over 80% of the world population, we study gender norms on two distinct policy issues: 1) basic rights,...

This paper explores how historical gender roles become entrenched as norms over the long run. In the historical United States, gender roles on the frontier looked starkly different from those in settled areas. Male-biased sex ratios led to higher marriage rates for women and lower for men. Land...

We examine the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on productivity in the context of taxi drivers. The AI we study assists drivers with finding customers by suggesting routes along which the demand is predicted to be high. We find that AI improves drivers' productivity by shortening the...

We document a robust negative relationship between mean annual hours in an occupation and the dispersion of annual hours within that occupation. We study a unified model of occupational choice and labor supply that features heterogeneity across occupations in the return to working additional...

I demonstrate that the profound change in working from home (WFH) in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic is concentrated among individuals with college degrees. Relative to 2015-19, the number of minutes worked from home on fall 2021 weekdays increased by over 90 minutes for college graduates; for...

A growing literature explores the impact of home-based versus office-based work. Differences in productivity may arise due to a treatment effect of the office or from workers with different abilities sorting into office or home work. We conduct an RCT in the data entry sector in India that...

We provide the first systematic account of summer declines in women's labor market activity. From May to July, the employment-to-population ratio among prime-age US women declines by 1.1 percentage points, whereas male employment rises; women's total hours worked fall by 9.8 percent, more than...

Past work has documented significant occupational segregation between Black and white workers in the U.S. labor force. Little work, however, has examined racial occupational segregation in recent years or by levels of education and then at the intersection of education and race. In this paper,...