Union membership displayed a ∩-shaped pattern over the 20th century, while the distribution of income sketched a ∪. A model of unions is developed to analyze these phenomena. There is a distribution of firms in the economy. Firms hire capital, plus skilled and unskilled labor. Unionization...

We report a puzzling pair of facts concerning the organization of science. The concentration of research output is declining at the department level but increasing at the individual level. For example, in evolutionary biology, over the period 1980 to 2000, the fraction of citation-weighted...

The division of labor first increased during industrialization and then decreased again after 1970 as job roles have expanded. We explain these trends in the organization of work through a simple model where (a) machines require standardization to exploit economies of scale and (b) more...

We study the location-specific component in research productivity of economics and finance faculty who have ever been affiliated with the top 25 universities in the last three decades. We find that there was a positive effect of being affiliated with an elite university in the 1970s; this effect...

We conduct the first empirical test of the knowledge burden hypothesis, one of several theories advanced to explain increasing team sizes in science. For identification, we exploit the collapse of the USSR as an exogenous shock to the knowledge frontier causing a sudden release of previously...

We estimate the effects of technology investments on the demand for skilled workers using longitudinally integrated employer-employee data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program infrastructure files spanning two Economic Censuses (1992 and 1997). We...

Research on the labor market impact of immigration typically relies on a single-good model of production with separable capital. This article discusses theory and evidence that suggest that this standard model is too simple to capture the labor market impact of immigration. A reasonable level of...

A central organizing framework of the voluminous recent literature studying changes in the returns to skills and the evolution of earnings inequality is what we refer to as the canonical model, which elegantly and powerfully operationalizes the supply and demand for skills by assuming two...

Does adoption of broadband internet in firms enhance labor productivity and increase wages? And is this technological change skill biased or factor neutral? We exploit rich Norwegian data to answer these questions. A public program with limited funding rolled out broadband access points, and...