Employment rates in the United States fell dramatically between February 2020 and April 2020 as the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic reverberated through the labor market. This paper uses data from the CPS Basic Monthly Files to document that the employment decline was particularly severe...

In the 1980s, the wages and employment rates of less-skilled Americans fell relative to those of more-skilled workers. This paper examines the contribution of the continuing inflow of less-skilled immigrants and the increasing importance of imports in the U.S. economy to these trends. Our...

Greater job creation in the US than in Germany has often been related to greater wage dispersion coupled with less regulated labour and product markets in the US. Based on the Comparative German American Structural Database and the International Adult Literacy Survey we find that employment of...

We examine the relationship between immigration and attitudes toward redistribution using a newly assembled data set of immigrant stocks for 140 regions of 16 Western European countries. Exploiting within-country variations in the share of immigrants at the regional level, we find that native...

We design and conduct large-scale surveys and experiments in six countries to investigate how natives perceive immigrants and how these perceptions influence their preferences for redistribution. We find strikingly large misperceptions about the number and characteristics of immigrants: in all...

This paper provides a simple conceptual framework that captures how different perceptions, attitudes, and biases about immigrants or minorities can shape preferences for redistribution. Through the lens of this framework, we review the empirical literature on the effects of racial diversity and...

The continuing inflow of hundreds of thousands of refugees into many European countries has ignited much political controversy and raised questions that require a fuller understanding of the determinants and consequences of refugee supply shocks. This paper revisits four historical refugee...

This paper finds that US employment changed differently relative to output in the Great Recession and recovery than in most other advanced countries or in the US in earlier recessions. Instead of hoarding labor, US firms reduced employment proportionately more than output in the Great Recession,...

This chapter analyzes the implications of the unexpected 2020-2021 COVID-19 pandemic for work and retirement in the U.S. The pandemic induced the greatest loss of jobs in the shortest period of time in U.S. history. A slow economic recovery would surely have endangered work longer/retire later...

This paper examines the flexibility of wages across industries inthe U.S. and seeks to determine the potential impact which changes in the industrial wage structure may have for employment. With regard to the flexibility of wages across industries, we find that the U.S., alone among the major...