Nominally free, unrestricted training in portable computer skills is offered by the majority of U.S. temporary help supply (THS) establishments, a practice that is inconsistent with the competitive model of training. This paper asks why temporary help firms provide free general skills training....

The U.S. temporary help services (THS) industry grew at 11 percent annually between 1979 to 1995, five times more rapidly than non-farm employment. Contemporaneously, courts in 46 states adopted exceptions to the common law doctrine of employment at will that limit employers' discretion to...

Labor Market Intermediaries (LMIs) are entities or institutions that interpose themselves between workers and firms to facilitate, inform, or regulate how workers are matched to firms, how work is accomplished, and how conflicts are resolved. This paper offers a conceptual foundation for...

An emerging literature argues that changes in the allocation of workplace "tasks" between capital and labor, and between domestic and foreign workers, has altered the structure of labor demand in industrialized countries and fostered employment polarization--that is, rising employment in the...

Two ailments limit the effectiveness and threaten the long-term viability of the U.S. Social Security Disability Insurance program (SSDI). First, the program is ineffective in assisting the vast majority of workers with less severe disabilities to reach their employment potential or earn their...

Abstract We evaluate the duration of the China trade shock and its impact on a wide range of outcomes over the period 2000 to 2019. The shock plateaued in 2010, enabling analysis of its effects for nearly a decade past its culmination. Adverse impacts of import competition on manufacturing...

This review considers the evolution of economic thinking on the relationship between digital technology and inequality across four decades, encompassing four related but intellectually distinct paradigms, which I refer to as the education race, the task polarization model, the...

The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) provided small businesses with roughly $800 billion dollars in uncollateralized, low-interest loans during the pandemic, almost all of which will be forgiven. With 93 percent of small businesses ultimately receiving one or more loans, the PPP nearly...

The race between education and technology provides a canonical framework that does an excellent job of explaining U.S. wage structure changes across the twentieth century. The framework involves secular increases in the demand for more-educated workers from skill-biased technological change,...

We study the impact of AI on labor markets, using establishment level data on vacancies with detailed occupational information comprising the near-universe of online vacancies in the US from 2010 onwards. We classify establishments as "AI exposed" when their workers engage in tasks that are...