This paper builds a world atlas of child penalties in employment based on micro data from 134 countries. The estimation of child penalties is based on pseudo-event studies of first child birth using cross-sectional data. The pseudo-event studies are validated against true event studies using...

Recent research has uncovered large spatial heterogeneity in intergenerational mobility across neighborhoods in countries around the world. Yet there is little consensus on the reasons why mobility is high in some neighborhoods and low in others. This paper analyzes a generalized mobility model...

Migration is a key mechanism through which local labor markets adjust to economic shocks. In this paper, we analyze the migration response of American workers to two of the most important shocks that hit US manufacturing since the 1990s: Chinese import competition and the introduction of...

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...

We analyze how output and wages behave under different scenarios for technological progress that may culminate in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), defined as the ability of AI systems to perform all tasks that humans can perform. We assume that human work can be decomposed into atomistic...

Worker shortages are common in many industries. This paper examines the effect of government subsidies to address these shortages in the context of a reform that tied Medicaid payments to nursing home staffing levels. We find that the reform substantially increased staffing, especially for...

David Ricardo initially believed machinery would help workers but revised his opinion, likely based on the impact of automation in the textile industry. Despite cotton textiles becoming one of the largest sectors in the British economy, real wages for cotton weavers did not rise for decades. As...

We examine the repercussions of protectionist policies implemented in the United States since 2018 on the composition of workforce and career choices within the semiconductor industry. We find that the shift towards protectionism, aimed at reviving domestic manufacturing and employment,...

Licensed workers could be shielded from unemployment during recession since occupational licensing laws are asymmetric--making unlicensed workers an illegal substitute for licensed workers but not the reverse. We test our hypothesis using a difference-in-differences event study research design...

The evolution of work is of emerging importance to advanced economies' growth. In this study, we develop a new semantic-distance-based algorithm to identify "new work," namely the new types of jobs introduced in the US. We characterize how "new work" relates to task content of jobs and skill...