Are labor markets in higher-income countries more meritocratic, in the sense that worker-job matching is based on skills rather than idiosyncratic attributes unrelated to productivity? If so, why? And what are the aggregate consequences? Using internationally comparable data on worker skills and...

The Global Repository of Income Dynamics (GRID) is a new open-access, cross- country database that contains a wide range of micro statistics on income inequality, dynamics, and mobility. It has four key characteristics: it is built on micro panel data drawn from administrative records; it fully...

We show that the largest increase in unemployment benefits in U.S. history had large spending impacts and small job-finding impacts. This finding has three implications. First, increased benefits were important for explaining aggregate spending dynamics--but not employment dynamics--during the...

Licensed workers could be shielded from unemployment during recession since occupational licensing laws are asymmetric--making unlicensed workers an illegal substitute for licensed workers but not the reverse. We test our hypothesis using a difference-in-differences event study research design...

We examine the link between labour market developments and new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and software in 16 European countries over the period 2011- 2019. Using data for occupations at the 3-digit level in Europe, we find that on average employment shares have increased...

We estimate an income process that is consistent with key facts on individual income risk and its variation over the business cycle. In particular, the estimated process generates income fluctuations that display (i) flat and acyclical variance, (ii) volatile and procyclical skewness, (iii) very...

I generalize the canonical model--in which relative supply and demand for worker skills shape the skill premium--incorporating monopsony power, minimum wages, and unemployment. I estimate the extended canonical model using national data and, separately, state-level data. I show that...

This paper studies aggregate labor market dynamics when workers have heterogeneous skills for tasks which are subject to non-uniform labor demand shocks. When workers have different skills, movements in aggregate wages partly reflect a reallocation of different workers across tasks and into...

This paper builds a general equilibrium framework with firm and worker heterogeneity, monopsony power, and task-based production to quantify the long-run effects of education, biased demand shocks, and minimum wage. I take it to Brazilian data for 1998 and 2012 and find that (i) supply and...

We address three core questions about the hypothesized role of newly emerging job categories ('new work') in counterbalancing the erosive effect of task-displacing automation on labor demand: what is the substantive content of new work; where does it come from; and what effect does it have on...