This paper evaluates claims about large macroeconomic implications of new advances in AI. It starts from a task-based model of AI's effects, working through automation and task complementarities. So long as AI's microeconomic effects are driven by cost savings/productivity improvements at the...

The endogenous growth literature has explored the transition from a Malthusian world where real wages, living standards and labor productivity are all linked to factor endowments, to one where (endogenous) productivity change embedded in modern industrial growth breaks that link. Recently,...

This essay discusses several potential economic, political and social costs of the current path of AI technologies. I argue that if AI continues to be deployed along its current trajectory and remains unregulated, it may produce various social, economic and political harms. These include:...

We add to recent evidence on deindustrialization and document a new pattern: increasing industry polarization over time. We assess whether these patterns can be explained by a dynamic open economy model of structural change in which the two primary driving forces are sector-biased productivity...

In this paper we first document inequality trends in wages, hours worked, earnings, consumption, and wealth for Germany from the last twenty years. We generally find that inequality was relatively stable in West Germany until the German unification (which happened politically in 1990 and in our...

To what extent do different firms follow different wage policies? How do such policies affect worker mobility between firms, and what are the effects of different wage bargaining regimes? The empirical branch of personnel economics has long been hampered by a lack of representative data sets....

This study estimates what fraction of the rise in family income inequality in the United States between 1968 and 2000 is accounted for by change in each of the family income components such as wages, employment, and hours worked of family heads and spouses, family structure, and other incomes....

We contribute a theory in which three channels interact to determine the degree of monopsony power and therefore the wedge between a worker's spot wage and her marginal product (henceforth, the wage markdown): (1) heterogeneity in worker-firm-specific preferences (nonwage amenities), (2) firm...

What is inequality in health? Are economists' standard tools for measuring income inequality relevant or useful for measuring it? Does income protect health and does income inequality endanger it? I discuss two different concepts of health inequality and relate each of them to the literature on...

This paper summarizes the research on some of the major inequalities that have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic across OECD countries. It reviews findings related to inequalities across the income distribution, sectors and regions, gender, and inequalities in education inputs for...