We argue that the US tax system is biased against labor and in favor of capital and has become more so in recent years. As a consequence, it has promoted inefficiently high levels of automation. Moving from the US tax system in the 2010s to optimal taxation of capital and labor would raise...

Burnout of physicians and other medical personnel is a major problem in the economics of healthcare systems, potentially costing billions of dollars. Knowledge of the determinants and costs of burnout at the organization level is sparse, making it difficult to assess the net benefits of...

During the 1970s and 1980s immigration, trade, and foreign investment became increasingly important in the U.S. labor market. The number of legal and illegal immigrants to the country increased, altering the size and composition of the work force and substantially raising the immigrant share of...

This paper examines evidence regarding the impact of the changed labor market on the higher educational system. Four basic propositions can be drawn from the paper's findings. Firstly, the labor market for the highly educated underwent a downturn in the 1970s, reducing the relative earnings of...

Workers have responded differently to declining union density in the US and UK. US workers have unfilled demand for unions whereas many UK workers free-ride at unionized workplaces. To explain this difference, we create a scalar measure of worker needs for representation and relate desire for...

(1) The U.S. share of the world's science and engineering graduates is declining rapidly as European and Asian universities, particularly from China, have increased S&E degrees while US degree production has stagnated

The Great Recession tested the ability of the "great U.S. jobs machine" to limit the severity of unemployment in a major economic downturn and to restore full employment quickly afterward. In the crisis the American labor market failed to live up to expectations. The level and duration of...

For many problems in macroeconomics, development economics, labor economics, and international trade, whether technical change is biased towards particular factors is of central importance. This paper develops a simple framework to analyze the forces that shape these biases. There are two major...

We show that even in the absence of diminishing returns in production and techno-logical spillovers, international trade leads to a stable world income distribution. This is because specialization and trade introduce de facto diminishing returns: countries that accumulate capital faster than...

This paper develops the thesis that credit market frictions may be an important contributor to high unemployment in Europe. When a change in the technological regime necessitates the creation of new firms, this can happen relatively rapidly in the U.S. where credit markets function efficiently....