How will the emergence of ChatGPT and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) affect the skill premium? To address this question, we propose a nested constant elasticity of substitution production function that distinguishes among three types of capital: traditional physical capital...

Wages have been spreading out across workers over time - or in other words, the 90th/50th wage ratio has risen over time. A key question is, has the productivity distribution also spread out across worker skill levels over time? Using our calculations of productivity by skill level for the U.S.,...

How worker productivity evolves with tenure and experience is central to economics, shaping, for example, life-cycle earnings and the losses from involuntary job separation. Yet, worker-level productivity is hard to identify from observational data. This paper introduces direct measurement of...

We estimate long-run elasticities of substitution between intermediate inputs for Indian manufacturing plants. India's trade liberalization in the early 1990s provides an ideal natural policy experiment, with permanent and heterogeneous tariff reductions inducing changes in relative prices which...

When explaining the declining labor income share in advanced economies, the macro literature finds that the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor is greater than one. However, the vast majority of micro-level estimates shows that capital and labor are complements (elasticity less...

In low-income communities, pressure to share income with others may disincentivize work, distorting labor supply. We document that across countries, social groups that undertake more interpersonal transfers work fewer hours. Using a field experiment, we enable piece-rate factory workers in Côte...

We study the extent to which collusion can explain the under-provision of clean sanitation technologies in developing countries. Using desludging services in Dakar as a case-study, we document that prices are 66% higher in areas where prices are likely coordinated by a large trade association,...

This paper shows that ethnically remote locations do not reap the full peace dividend from increased market access. Exploiting the staggered implementation of the US-initiated Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) and using high-resolution data on ethnic composition and violent conflict for...

This paper studies the welfare effects of unemployment insurance (UI) in low-income countries characterized by high levels of informality, weak enforcement of UI claims, and job search frictions. We assess the impact of UI on workers' welfare in the presence of moral hazard and liquidity...

Between 1967 and 1974, a bilateral treaty increased circular labor migration from Malawi to South Africa by 200%, bringing over 53 million USD in earnings into origin communities. A deadly migrant worker plane crash in 1974 ended these flows and led to migrant repatriation. We study how this...