The phenomenon of workers moving from a poor to a rich economy is high on the political agenda. When a worker moves to a richer economy, what is gained by the move? The empirical challenge in giving an answer stems from the difficulty to disentangle income differences from many other...

We examine how changes in task content over time condition occupational wage development. Using survey data from Germany, we document substantial heterogeneity in within-occupational changes in task content. Combining this evidence with administrative data on individual employment outcomes over...

In models recently published by several influential macroeconomic theorists, rigidity in the real wages that firms pay newly hired workers plays a crucial role in generating realistically large cyclical fluctuations in unemployment. There is remarkably little evidence, however, on whether...

Using a longitudinal matched employer-employee data set for Portugal over the 1986-2005 period, this study analyzes the heterogeneity in wages responses to aggregate labor market conditions for newly hired workers and existing workers. Accounting for both worker and firm heterogeneity, the data...

We show that occupation mobility creates the illusion of cyclical hiring wages. Using administrative data, we find that wages of new hires who remain in the same occupation are no more cyclical than those of existing workers, whereas wages of occupation switchers are highly cyclical. We uncover...

We offer an integrated explanation and empirical analysis of the polarization of U.S. employment and wages between 1980 and 2005, and the concurrent growth of low skill service occupations. We attribute polarization to the interaction between consumer preferences, which favor variety over...

After a decade in which wages and employment fell precipitously in low-skill occupations and expanded in high-skill occupations, the shape of U.S. earnings and job growth sharply polarized in the 1990s. Employment shares and relative earnings rose in both low and high-skill jobs, leading to a...

We find robust evidence that cohorts of male graduates who start college during worse economic times earn higher average wages than those who start during better times. This gap is not explained by differences in selection into employment, in economic conditions at the time of college...

Workers who enter the labor market during recessions experience lasting earnings losses, but the role of non-pay amenities in exacerbating or counteracting these losses remains unknown. Using population-scale data from Germany, we find that labor market entry during recessions generates a 5...