Wages have been spreading out across workers over time - or in other words, the 90th/50th wage ratio has risen over time. A key question is, has the productivity distribution also spread out across worker skill levels over time? Using our calculations of productivity by skill level for the U.S.,...

We propose a model of the interplay of employment relationships and community-based interactions among workers and managers. Employment relations can be either tough (where workers are monitored intensively and obtain few rents, and managers do not provide informal favors for their workers) or...

This article reviews the literature on automation and its impact on labor markets, wages, factor shares, and productivity. I first introduce the task model and explain why this framework offers a compelling way to think about recent labor market trends and the effects of automation technologies....

We consider large, permanent shocks to individual occupations whose arrival date is uncertain. We are motivated by the advent of self-driving trucks, which will dramatically reduce demand for truck drivers. Using a bare-bones overlapping generations model, we examine an occupation facing...

We study the impact of Federal alcohol Prohibition in 1919 on workers in the alcohol industry and their families using newly linked census records that allow us to follow spouses, sons and daughters. Immediately after Prohibition, men previously working in alcohol-related industries were less...

This chapter traces the evolution of the study of gender in the labor market, focusing on how academic thinking on this topic has evolved alongside real world developments in gender inequality from the 1980s to the present. We present a simple model of female labor supply to illustrate how...

Modern tech platforms provide workers real-time control over when they work, and increasingly, flexible pay: the option to be paid immediately after work. We investigate the labor supply effects of pay flexibility and the implications of present-biased preferences among gig-economy workers....

Most economists maintain that the labor market in the United States is 'tight' because unemployment rates are low. They infer from this that there is potential for wage-push inflation. However, real wages are falling rapidly at present and, prior to that, real wages had been stagnant for some...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic two new timely poverty measures have been developed to monitor fast-changing economic conditions for the most deprived. The Han et al. near real-time poverty measure uses responses to a global income question on the Monthly Current Population Survey (CPS)...

Leveraging county-level variation in exposure to industry-specific foreign-based robotics shocks, this study is the first to explore the relationship between U.S. robotics expansions and crime. Instrumental variables estimates show that a 10 percent increase in robotics exposure led to a 0.2 to...