We provide the first long-run dataset of regional employment structures and regional GDP and GDP per capita in 1990 international dollars, stretching over more than 100 years. These data allow us to compare regions over time, among each other, and to other parts of the world. After some brief...

US voters have been moving apart in the last twenty years. This paper analyzes how their voting participation has partitioned by looking at US counties in the 2012 Presidential elections. To tackle this question, we propose a methodology that jointly addresses spatial autocorrelation of the...

The vast majority of existing studies that estimate the average unexplained gender pay gap use unnecessarily restrictive linear versions of the Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition. Using a notably rich and large data set of 1.7 million employees in Switzerland, we investigate how the methodological...

We investigate minimum wage spillovers by exploiting the first-time introduction of a minimum wage within a quasi-experiment in a context with an extraordinary large bite: the German roofing industry. We find positive wage spillovers for medium-skilled workers with wages just above the minimum...

Using rich linked employer-employee data for (West) Germany between 1996 and 2014, we analyze the most important drivers of the recent rise in German wage dispersion and pin down the relative contribution of plant and worker characteristics. Moreover, we separately investigate the drivers of...

We study the impact of selection bias on estimates of the gender pay gap, focusing on whether the gender pay gap has fallen since 1981. Previous research has found divergent results across techniques, identification strategies, data sets, and time periods. Using Michigan Panel Study of Income...

This paper shows that higher levels of perceived wage inequality are associated with a weaker (stronger) belief into meritocratic (non-meritocratic) principles as being important in determining individual wages. This finding is robust to the use of an instrumental-variable estimation strategy...

This paper examines the relationship between idiosyncratic risk in labour income and fluctuations in aggregate labour market quantities for Great Britain. We use data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) for 1991-2008 and from the BHPS sub-sample of Understanding Society for 2010-2014....

I study the optimal taxation of robots and labor income. In the model, robots substitute for routine labor and complement non-routine labor. I show that while it is optimal to distort robot adoption, robots may be either taxed or subsidized. The robot tax exploits general-equilibrium effects to...

Empirical findings suggest a positive correlation between inequality and social immobility, a phenomenon coined the Gatsby curve. However, complete explanations of the phenomenon have not yet been proposed. This paper answers two questions: What are Gatsby curves? When do they exist? We build a...